


Marooned

by GloriaMundi



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: AU, C17, Historical, Multi, Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-01-31
Updated: 2005-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 20:49:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world's changed. When everything you loved is gone, what's left? Duty, honour, dreams, dust . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marooned

  

  * Chapter One: In Which Jack is Found
  

  * Chapter Two: In Which Norrington Visits a Friend
  

  * Chapter Three: In Which Jack is Lost
  

  * Chapter Four: In Which Norrington Meets a Pirate
  

  * Chapter Five: In Which the Black Pearl Meets Her Fate 
  

  * Chapter Six: In Which Norrington Follows Orders 
  

  * Chapter Seven: In Which Jack Burns Driftwood
  

  * Chapter Eight: In Which Norrington Tells the Truth
  

  * Chapter Nine: In Which Jack Fears Drowning 
  

  * Chapter Ten: In Which Norrington Stays On Board
  

  * Chapter Eleven: In Which Jack Sings to the Mermaids
  

  * Chapter Twelve: In Which Norrington Learns the Pearl's Fate
  

  * Chapter Thirteen: In Which Jack Performs Sea-Burial
  

  * Chapter Fourteen: In Which Norrington Dreams of Pirates
  

  * Chapter Fifteen: In Which Jack Listens to the Rain
  

  * Chapter Sixteen: In Which Norrington is Irritated
  

  * Chapter Seventeen: In Which Jack Finds Himself Back in the Brig
  

  * Chapter Eighteen: In Which Norrington Checks His Charts
  

  * Chapter Nineteen: In Which Jack Makes a Wish
  

  * Chapter Twenty: In Which Norrington Makes a Discovery
  

  * Chapter Twenty-One: In Which Jack Takes Sides
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Two: In Which Anchor is Weighed
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Three: In Which Jack Seeks Solitude
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Four: In Which Norrington Makes Some Observations
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Five: In Which Jack Requires Sanctuary
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Six: In Which Norrington Rescues Jack
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Seven: In Which Jack is Liberated
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Eight: In Which Norrington's Vision Clears
  

  * Chapter Twenty-Nine: In Which Jack Sets a Challenge
  

  * Chapter Thirty: In Which Norrington Countenances Piracy
  

  * Chapter Thirty-One: In Which Jack Sets a Course
  

  


* * *

  


###  Chapter One: In Which Jack is Found

  


* * *

Really, it was remarkably lucky that Will and Elizabeth had managed to find him here. But after all, he _was_ Captain Jack Sparrow: maybe there was no luck to it after all, but just a good story telling itself so that he didn't have to make up very much. For they'd found him, after all: their ship stood out in the bay, though he was far too comfortable here to raise his head and look at her. He was lying with his head in Elizabeth's lap, and her husband refilling his cup as soon as he drained it. Good rum, too: none of your watered-down molasses and rat turds, but the sort of thing the quality drank, when they took it into their minds to slum it for an evening.

Elizabeth's hand stroked over his face, lingering on his mouth. "Jack," she crooned, "I thought we'd never see you again!"

"We missed you, Jack. Life was simply too dull in Port Royal without you." Will was smiling at him affectionately. Very affectionately. His hand lingered on Jack's as he passed another cupful of rum to the pirate captain.

"Well, you're here now," said Jack brightly. "We should celebrate!"

"Oh, yes," cooed Elizabeth as she leant down to kiss him. Jack suffered this indignity bravely, for quite a while: her mouth tasted cool and sweet, and her tongue moved promisingly against his. But eventually he had to peel her away.

"Patience, love," he said gently. "What of your poor husband?"

And then Will was kissing him too, all fierce and fiery with his tongue invading Jack's mouth and his hands making short work of Jack's loose, tattered shirt. Jack moaned into the kiss, unable to keep from thrusting his hips up against Will's as his friend sprawled half over him: they must have been crushing poor Elizabeth, but she never complained, just carried on stroking and teasing with her soft white hands.

Faster than he expected, she'd twisted around somehow and those hands were at his breeches and then on his cock, and he groaned into Will's kiss.

"Careful, love, or it'll go off in your hand," he moaned. Will's mouth was working over the scars on his chest, and Elizabeth was looking at him triumphantly as she, oh, she'd been learning from her husband right enough. Jack yelled and convulsed, and every nerve in his body glowed brightly for an instant.

Elizabeth was licking her hand. "Tastes so good," she murmured indistinctly. "Will, I need ..."

But Jack was tired -- there'd been something creeping along the beach, dragging its scaly tail and keeping him awake, last night -- and he wasn't really in the mood for more. He banished the Turners with a chuckle and sat up.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Two: In Which Norrington Visits a Friend

  


* * *

The taste of his broken oath was a bitterness that underlay every morsel of food, every drink he took, every breath that kept him alive. He'd recently acquired a taste for rum: it was that or do without the temporary anaesthetic of strong drink, for most of the dockside taverns sold nothing but rum or ale. The rum almost cancelled the bitterness. Almost.

They knew he wasn't one of them, in the taverns. They recognised something of what he had been, despite everything he'd done to disguise himself. Day by day the ragged clothes, the sneer, the slouch became less of a disguise. This _was_ what he was now: what was left of him.

It wasn't as though he were the only ex-Navy man scratching out a living here, half the world away from the land of his birth. Once or twice he'd seen a face he recognised from before the war. The first time had been in the Rose and Crown, but Norrington's leg had been bad, still, and by the time he'd reached the table where the other man -- foremast jack, Joseph Lee, speech still burred with a Plymouth accent -- had been sitting, there'd been no one there.

Groves was still here, bitterer than everything else put together. Norrington tried to visit him whenever he returned to Nassau, but it was becoming harder to face his former comrade's bleak silence. Today he had sat beside the Lieutenant's bed and talked in measured, optimistic tones of the latest news from the former colonies: twenty minutes of it, at the end of which Groves had silenced him with a look, and had said, "Why did you let me live?"

Of course there hadn't been an easy answer to that. In the end, Norrington had said, "Because I'd already seen too many good men die."

"They're the lucky ones," Groves had said, and then had turned his face to the wall and pretended to be asleep. Perhaps he really had drifted off again: the Mission had given him syrup of poppies for the pain in his phantom limbs, and Norrington knew all too well the sweet dreaming daze that the drug bestowed.

He wanted rum. The wounded leg had healed badly, and with agonising slowness. It heralded each slight variation in the weather with paroxysms and bright explosions of pain. There was a storm coming, and walking was so painful that anyone passing him must have thought him already three-quarters drunk. His uneven gait had worn almost through his left boot-sole already, and he could feel mud against his bare skin in a couple of places. But after all, his boots were the least of his worries.

If he'd kept his oath and his honour, he'd be dead and buried by now.

There was a girl at the Ship who reminded him, by candlelight, of Elizabeth. He'd gone to her once or twice, when the leg was bad, for distraction. Somehow, over the winter, it had become a habit. She thought him peculiar because he paid her extra. He still had a little money, and Elizabeth herself had given him some of her jewellery to sell. She'd been red-eyed when she visited him in the little hospital in the Mission, and when he'd told her his plans she'd started to cry again.

He owed his life -- many of them did -- to Elizabeth's efforts, and her father's, in those last few terrible days, before the _Nereid_ had come to carry them all back to England. He wondered, sometimes, what had become of her and Will, and the Governor, and the rest of them. Sometimes he remembered the wedding: three years ago, but it seemed like another world, the epitome of everything that was lost: music and dancing, food, wine, civility. Elizabeth in that dress, the radiance on Will's face, the pride on Governor Swann's.

There were, of course, no letters any more.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Three: In Which Jack is Lost

  


* * *

For a while after the sea spat him back onto the shore, he'd drifted in and out of delirium. Someone had looked after him, or perhaps he had managed -- always safer -- to look after himself. The round, cold welts on his leg were cleaned every day: salt water made them sting, but gradually the angry red tendrils beneath his skin faded. One day he'd thought them a peculiar way of writing, an unknown hand using his blood as ink: the next, he'd decided that they were the boneless arms of a baby sea-horror, a creature that would grow up just like the one that'd marked him.

The nights were worse. He woke once when the sky was utterly black -- no stars, no moon -- knowing that if he could find north, then Norrington would find him. In the dream, that seemed a fine thing. He could see the Commodore striding down the lines of latitude to claim him. There were no irons in his hand this time. But Jack had lost his compass and the storm had spun him around so often that he could no longer be sure of north.

"A compass that doesn't point north," Norrington had said: but, Jack decided, it had not been contempt in his voice after all. It had been disappointment. He wanted Jack to find him again, and oh, Jack longed to be found.

When he awoke in a cold sweat from that dream, the compass was clutched tight in his hand, pointing its futile arrow to the Isla de Muerta. Jack swallowed, hard. "Norrington," he said to the embers. "North. Norrington." The alliteration pleased him -- and the sound of his own voice was better than the wave-backed silence -- but he was too tired to repeat it more than a couple of times. The sun had not yet risen, and he was cold. He turned onto his other side, facing away from the sea, and tried to dream of Elizabeth and rum.

There was Elizabeth again, back on that little island where Barbossa'd left the two of them. Just the sort of occasion about which Jack'd enjoyed many a pleasurable daydream: marooned, with a young lady -- dressed only in her _underwear_ \-- for company and audience! Jack had always felt that he'd excel himself in such a situation. But it seemed, this time around, that in Elizabeth Swann he'd met his match.

"You're all mine, Jack Sparrow," she said, and she was pinning him down, straddling him, in a way that should've been tremendously exciting. "All mine." And her cold, cold hand insinuated its way beneath his shirt, and came to rest above his heart.

"I'm my own man, Miss Swann," Jack tried to say, though the words didn't come out quite as he'd intended. That'd be the rum she'd plied him with, cunning creature. "All my own. But you're welcome to share." Still flat on his back, he spread his arms wide, inviting her to take advantage of him.

Oh, how he hated it when memories got in the way! For though he knew very well how the dream _should_ have gone, he was powerless to make it so; instead, he felt his dream-self succumb to all that rum and, stretched out beside the fire, begin to snore drunkenly. Jack, trapped impotent in his own dream, could not move or speak or see, but he could _feel_ the presence of the perfidious Miss Swann, watching him with her narrowed cat-eyes, waiting until she was sure he'd be no impediment to her plan.

Could feel, too, the moment when she leaned over Jack, close and warm, and dropped a single chaste kiss upon his forehead; a kiss as hot and sweet as her touch, earlier, had been cold and dead.

The next morning he woke late, clear-headed. It had rained in the night and the fire had gone out, but the sun was warm on his scarred skin, and he remembered all that had befallen him.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Four: In Which Norrington Encounters a Pirate

  


* * *

He'd been in Nassau for long enough, and it was time to head south and rejoin the _Ariel_: but his careful enquiries turned up no news of any ship ready to brave the Spanish -- French -- blockade that lurked like a cat outside the mouse-run of the Windward Passage.

A fishing-boat would have suited him better than a pirate ship, but beggars, he'd found, couldn't be choosers, and so he'd ventured into the King's Arms, and taken a seat near the door, and listened.

They'd known him, again, for a stranger. Even now he was no longer a threat, he did not belong, and so the men -- and not a few women -- in the tavern spoke of mutual friends and feuds, of the Spanish treasure fleet (almost everyone continued to speak of 'Spanish' and 'French' as though there were still a difference) and the press-gangs that had been trawling Nassau Town in search of galleon-crews. They spoke, in short, of everything except James Norrington's business.

After a while, the feeling of being watched -- not as though he were a mouse, but not as carefully as if he were a Spaniard, either -- made him want to hit someone, and so he finished his drink and began to limp towards the door.

"Commodore Norrington," said somebody, soft-voiced, as he passed their table, and he'd have kept on walking if it hadn't been for the novelty of being addressed by a woman.

A dark-skinned woman, as it turned out, but she looked clean and not at all whorish, and she had spoken politely enough.

Nevertheless he said, "You're mistaken," and turned away from her.

"Your reputation precedes you, Commodore," she said.

"There's no Navy worth the name to bestow any such rank on me," said Norrington. "There hasn't been for more than a year." He had given up on escaping the tavern and stood still, leaning his weight somewhat awkwardly against the scarred wall.

"You're still harrying the Spanish," said the woman, and her white teeth flashed in a way that reminded him of somebody.

"You dislike the Spanish?" said Norrington stiffly, as though they were at some formal dinner.

The woman spat.

"Any man who kills a Dago," she said, "is a friend of mine. And you've slain more than a few."

"I'm happy to hear --"

"And I hear, _Commodore_, that you're looking for passage south," said the woman.

"I need to rejoin my -- my friends," said Norrington.

"Your _Ariel_'s still at Stabroek, ain't she?" said the woman.

"Georgetown," corrected Norrington.

"Used to be, aye. My ship's heading down that way. Reckon we could drop you off, _Commodore_."

"Don't call me that," said Norrington, low and icy: the woman swayed back, smiling, hands up as if it were just a joke.

Norrington sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing away his bad temper. "I can't pay you anything," he told her.

"You can owe me one," said the dark-skinned woman. Her grin flashed again. She was not a whore: not a serving-girl: she was, Norrington realised at last, a _pirate_, merry and free in exactly the way that had once set his teeth on edge. Under the circumstances, he couldn't manage more than a dull spark of annoyance. And besides, he had noticed a number of other people -- other _pirates_, all right -- eyeing him from the dark interior of the tavern. None of them seemed threatening; not yet.

"What's your ship, madame?" he said, finding an answer in his heart before the sentence had formed in his head. "And when do you sail?"

"Far end of the quay," said the woman. "The _Maiden's Glory_." Her expression dared him to make a jest of the ship's name. "We sail tonight."

"I'll be there, Captain," said Norrington.

This time her smile seemed genuine.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Five: In Which the Black Pearl Meets Her Fate

  


* * *

They'd been sailing in company, he remembered that much; yet he did not remember parting from that company, or signalling to it, or even wondering about its fate. There had been no time: every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost.

Devils would've been better.

The fog had rolled towards them over the sea like a vast slow wave, smoothing the water beneath it. The _Pearl_'s black sails had slackened when the wind died suddenly. Jack Sparrow cried for the canvas to be reefed, and hauled himself aloft with the rest of them, struggling to breathe as the fog engulfed them, clinging to sail and stay and skin as though it sought out warmth.

"'T'isn't natural, such a fog in these latitudes," Gibbs muttered.

Jack shot him a sharp, reproving glare, but he said nothing. Had he (he wondered now) spoken to any of them? Or had he just cried orders to the crew in large?

The light that filtered through the fog was pearly and indistinct, and none of the crew cast shadows on the wooden deck. But there were shadows around them, moving. Not cold enough, not south enough, for ice, and these shadows moved at mast-height, like birds.

"Albatross!" yelled someone, pointing: and the rest of them crowded to the rail. But nothing came out of the mist.

The _Black Pearl_ was making almost no way now, gliding slow and stately as a ship in a bottle over the green-glass sea. Jack strained his eyes, but he could see nothing except the grey curtain of fog. According to the charts they were miles from land. Off to the west lay Brazil, and somewhere nearby a Spanish treasure-ship lurked, bristling with forty guns and hundreds of bloodthirsty Spanish sailors. No ship could outsail the _Pearl_: the _Santa Isabella_ must be in these waters.

Up ahead, they all heard something large heaving itself out of the water. A disturbingly long moment later, it splashed back into the ocean.

"Whale!" cried someone.

"That weren't no whale," muttered Hendricks, who'd sailed with the whaling fleet out of Hull before he came south to the Caribbean.

And then -- Jack had been at the helm once more, peering into the bright cloudy blankness, tapping the compass in its binnacle as it spun frantically -- something tremendously strong had taken the _Black Pearl_, and _tipped_ her as though she were no more than a child's toy spinning on a millpond. The men had cried out in prayer or blasphemy or simple anger. Jack had stumbled back from the wheel as it span crazily.

"Rudder's gone!" Stone had yelled from the taffrail, but Jack had known it already. He'd drawn his pistol from his sash, but balked: nothing to aim it at, and though some of the sailors were firing into the empty whiteness all around, there was no sound of pain or cry of rage to show that any shot had found a home. The only sounds were of the creaking, whirring wheel, of the waves lapping at the _Pearl_'s black hull; of water rushing, and Joe Turk's cry "We're struck!"; of something vast moving swiftly through the water, coming closer. Coming for the _Black Pearl_.

"'Tis no whale, Captain," Hendricks had been telling him, as though it made a difference. "'Tis something evil from the deep."

And he'd turned to --

No. No more.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Six: In Which Norrington Follows Orders

  


* * *

No more than a day out of Nassau -- well, a night and half a morning, for Anamaria'd insisted on catching the midnight tide -- and the _Maiden's Glory_, sweeping south across the blue Caribbean, had sighted another sail.

"French!" cried the lookout, and Anamaria cursed in a way that would've shocked Norrington even from a hard-bitten tar. The ship was headed east, towards one of the French ports on the south coast of Hispaniola: easy enough, as Norrington tried to show Anamaria on the charts, to hold course and let the enemy ship pass.

It wasn't that he was reluctant to engage -- quite the contrary -- but the _Maiden's Glory_ was no more than a belligerently overgunned ketch, and surely she stood little chance against a Naval brig.

Besides, she wasn't his to command.

"Just 'cause they're flyin' the French flag," said Anamaria darkly, loading a pistol, "don't mean a thing."

"You think they may be Spanish?" enquired Norrington.

Anamaria shrugged. "No difference any more, is there?"

Norrington turned on his heel and raised the glass to his eye. Even now, even on a pirate ship, he could not be rude to a fellow-captain: but that had bitten deep.

The other ship had noticed their approach now. He could imagine her captain making jokes about lost fishermen. Indeed, with his spy-glass, he could see three or four men on her quarterdeck. They did not seem concerned by the _Maiden's_ approach.

In contrast, Anamaria's crew were quick and businesslike as they made ready the guns. Not Naval discipline, to be sure, but he'd been amazed at first to see common tars taking orders from a woman. And this Anamaria -- she'd give him no other name -- knew which orders needed giving.

"What do you want me to do?" he called after her as she sprang down to the deck.

"Fight!" she yelled, grinning: as much a command to her crew as an answer to his question.

Norrington did as he was told.

Later, when the _Sorciére_ \-- he'd been quite close enough, thank you, to read the ornate gilt lettering on her stern -- was limping away, scarred by boarding-axes and high in the water without her cargo of sugar and silver, Norrington asked Anamaria why she'd let the ship, and her crew, sail free.

She shrugged. "They were French, right enough. It's the Spanish I hate."

Norrington set his teeth. "You said yourself that there's no difference now. And England's at war --"

"Not any more," said Anamaria, with contempt.

"The battle may be over, but the war remains," said Norrington, staring out over the water rather than let her see how wounding her words had been.

"You think I care what they do, in their pretty gilt throne-rooms in places I've never been?" demanded Anamaria. "The Spanish I hate. They may have whored themselves to the French king, but they're still Spanish in their hearts. The French are prey, no more than that. The Dutch I'd as soon leave."

"The English?" said Norrington. He had bound the shallow cut in his arm, where he'd caught a French lieutenant's blade, and the sting was a welcome counterweight to the slow realisation that he was growing to respect a woman whose life was framed quite differently to his own.

Anamaria made an ugly noise that might have begun as a laugh. "The English?" she said, one finger on her lip as she pretended to think. "Ah, them. They don't come here no more."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Seven: In Which Jack Burns Driftwood

  


* * *

Every morning he walked the tideline, searching for driftwood to feed to his fire. Day after day scraps of black wood washed up on the sand. They burned well, though they took a while to catch fire, and he collected them even after he remembered where he'd seen wood that colour: even after it began to feel like grave-robbing.

There were never any bodies. Eaten or dragged to the depths or drifted away. "And I alone survived," he told the black wood. Truth be told, he was getting tired of the sound of his own voice: getting tired of constant sobriety: tired of the ache in his leg and the emptiness to which he always spoke.

Someone had been here once. He -- conceivably, she -- had built a hut at the back of the beach, though all that remained were some flattish grey stones piled in a shape that once might have been walls. Jack busied himself with palm-fronds and green wood for a while, until he had something that gave him an indoors to crawl into at night. His hearth was outside the doorway, which meant that the tiny space within was often full of smoke: but that kept the spiders away. He promised himself that when the weather turned bad, he'd build a better shack, but after a while he realised that the weather here was too big, too much, to build against. All he could hope for was shade from the sun, something to keep off the worst of the rain, a roof that wasn't any great loss when the wind whipped it away in the middle of the night.

Some days, the wind brought the scent of growing things, and occasionally even the sounds of other people; voices and drumbeats and screams and songs. Even from the highest point on the hunchbacked cliffs that almost ringed the island, Jack couldn't see land, though there was a faint cloudline on the western rim of the world that might mark the coast of Brazil. He suspected that the voices were not real, but still he listened for them when the wind blew from the west.

At least there was food. He'd read of men surviving for years on desert islands, but in novels the heroes were always fortunate enough to be marooned on islands where, long ago, ship's crews had sent ashore breeding pairs of goats or sheep, for the succour of shipwrecked sailors. There weren't even rats here; were it not for the half-walled hut, anonymous as a solitary skull, he'd have thought that no ship (no _European_ ship) had ever dropped anchor in the bay.

Jack cursed Fortuna, roundly and jovially, and made his own luck. He found shellfish on the rocks, and after a few extremely unpleasant days he learnt to distinguish the ones that didn't make him sick. There were coconuts on the trees -- hard work, but a pleasing diversion -- and fish in the sea. (Jack had never feared drowning, but he remembered being pulled down, and was afraid of _being_ drowned. He forced himself to swim every day.) He chewed doggedly at kelp and wrack, and made himself a sling with which, once a week or so, he managed to bring down an especially dim-witted gull.

From the beach where he'd woken, he could see no more than sixty degrees of grey-green ocean, out of which the round red sun popped when the weather was fine. It shone straight through the doorway of his little house, rousing him to a new day full of discovery and adventure. More often than not, after his first few lucid days, Jack swore drowsily, turned over and went back to sleep until the sun was high in the sky. There was nothing to occupy or distract him, except for the daily business of keeping himself alive: not even any laws to break, only the inescapable laws of nature that dictated he must live or die by his own efforts.

He had explored the island thoroughly once his injuries had healed, and he'd sat in the shade and sketched out a little map of it in the gritty sand. It looked like nothing as much as an apple with a bite taken out of it. (How Jack craved apples!) The land was high and rocky, except for this scooped-out eastern beach, and it was a steep climb to the lookout point. Jack made the climb most days anyway, for lack of any other pressing business. From time to time he saw a distant sail, which made him heap green wood on the signal-fire and jump up and down, screaming his throat raw; but none of the ships ever turned towards the island. The lookout point was marked, on his map, by a sprig of white coral. Between that and the coconut shell he called home, there was a round medallion of mother-of-pearl; the brackish spring that rose somewhere in the heart of the island and wound sluggishly across the beach. Jack dragged his fingers through the sand to mark its course, but his heart wasn't in it.

If he'd been a man who gave up easily, his nameless bones would be whitening on that little spit of land where Barbossa, twice, had left him. It would be Barbossa's victory, still, if Jack stopped fighting and let himself be swallowed by hunger, or cold, or the dizzying view from the cliff.

When he was afraid, which was most nights, he'd burn the black wood a piece at a time, and talk to the _Black Pearl_'s ghost. She told him stories and comforted him, and never spoke a word of blame for what had come out of the depths to claim her. Each morning after, waking and remembering her, he wept: but he saved the black wood for when night fell.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Eight: In Which Norrington Tells the Truth"&gt;

  


* * *

Norrington paced the tiny quarterdeck of the _Maiden's Glory_, turning over the matter in his mind. There was no one to whom he could speak of this: no one who was close enough to discuss matters of such an intimate nature. And yet he could not unravel it alone.

He had been raised to tell the truth, even when the consequences were unpleasant (the image of his mother's favourite porcelain vase, shattered on the drawing-room floor, made him smile to himself) and he had learnt to be as brutally honest with himself as with anyone else. And so it had to be admitted that he'd woken -- in a very definite state of arousal -- with Anamaria's smile bright in his mind's eye.

And yet he'd been thinking of Elizabeth, too.

A step behind him, clear above the creak of canvas, and Norrington was unpleasantly aware that firstly, he was violating another captain's personal space -- for so he would always think of the quarterdeck -- and secondly, he was about to be confronted by ... by Anamaria.

"What's got you so worked up, Commodore?" she demanded, gesturing at the invisible line he'd been pacing.

Norrington swallowed, and looked away, because somewhere along the line he'd become a coward; he couldn't tell her.

"Norrington?" said Anamaria, her voice gentler; that was worse.

"I was thinking about my ... my ship," he lied.

"HMS _Ariel_," said Anamaria.

"Just the _Ariel_ now, I'm afraid," said Norrington, with a quick half-smile.

He saw Anamaria open her mouth, and frown, and pause before she spoke. "However did you keep her, anyway?" she said at last. "I heard all the Navy ships in Port Royal were taken by the Spanish, without hardly a shot fired."

Norrington shrugged. "It was sheer luck. We were cruising east of the Windward Isles, looking to intercept what messengers we could and play havoc with their intelligence. Oh, the war was as good as lost already, but we'd had no news from Europe."

The afternoon sun was warm on his face, and Anamaria was watching him, listening to him, in silence. Around and above (and, no doubt, below) the men of the _Maiden's Glory_ mended, and tended, and sailed their ship. Norrington reminded himself that he was sailing south to his own command, his men, their shared lost cause: sunshine and leisure and pleasant company did not make this a holiday.

"We'd engaged the _Apollyon_, 60 guns -- aye, outgunned and outmanned, but she had the weather-gage -- and it was going poorly." (Norrington's mind presented him, unbidden, with the reality behind that euphemism: the deck red and slippery with flesh and blood, ghastly sounds of screaming crashing burning. He pushed the memory away.) "Then her magazine went up --"

"Boom!" Anamaria was grinning. "A terrible thing, aye," she said fiercely to his reproving look, "but you'd never have beaten her else. I'll bet you was all deaf for days!"

"Nearly a week," said Norrington, with a wry smile.

"Oh, I c'n see it now," Anamaria told him, eyes wide. What fine dark eyes she has, he thought, and chided himself for thinking it. "You tryin' to keep order, and none of 'em hearin' a word you said!"

"You speak as though you've lived through such a thing," said Norrington, turning to look at her curiously.

"Nah, not me," said Anamaria. "Heard that Jack Sparrow tell of it once, though."

"Jack Sparrow?" said Norrington, eyebrows raised. "I met --"

"Sailed with him, a few years back," said Anamaria gruffly, swinging round to stare ferociously at ... at the empty horizon ahead of them, as far as Norrington could see. He looked at Anamaria as she stood there at the helm of her ship, tension in every line of her body, and did not speak.

"You never finished your story, Norrington," she said after a long, quiet moment, while the _Maiden's Glory_ sped south before a stiff breeze and the sun sank towards the ocean, off to starboard. "Shipful of deaf men, and I'll bet you din't come through without a few knocks to the _Ariel_ too. Surprised you made it back at all."

And Norrington, recognising the challenge and the distraction both, did as he was bidden, and told her of Stabroek, and van Hoorst, and everything that had happened since.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Nine: In Which Jack Fears Drowning

  


* * *

He was south of them all, south (he thought) of the Line, maybe as far south as the River Plate where the silver came from. Might the compass guide him to some friendly place? He held it out, knees locked with the effort of staying still, until the needle stopped wavering and pointed true.

It led him to the water's edge, and he stopped short, reluctant to venture into the waves. (Boneless sinuous arms, too many of them, reaching to pull him down.) This was foolish. He was Captain Jack Sparrow. He was not afraid of drowning (but it wasn't drowning, it was _being drowned_). He was not afraid of the sea.

He was on an island, a low-lying chunk of rock in the middle of the ocean. An island he did not know from any chart. An island that should not exist. And the green sea was all around.

But he was Jack Sparrow, Captain Jack Sparrow: he'd been in worse plights than this, far worse. (Announcing it to the waves and the shadowy figures out on the rocks, Jack was impressed with the certainty and exuberance in his own voice.)

"Barbossa thought to maroon me!" he declaimed. "Set me ashore on a tiny spit of land -- not half the size of this charming isle -- and thought to see my bones when next he came a-calling. But no! Captain Jack's too smart for him, and drives too nice a bargain, eh?"

The echoes agreed with him.

"And Captain Jack Sparrow always finds a way, eh? A way to take himself right off that little islet: a way to get himself to Port Royal when Barbossa's that way bound ..."

Ah, Anamaria. Dear Anamaria. She'd never quite forgiven him for stealing her boat, but (Jack smirked at the thought) he'd forgiven her _everything_, all the slaps and sneers and unkind words, even the time she'd sailed away with his _Pearl_ ...

Jack shook his head. Not thinking about that, about the _Black Pearl_. Stolen away for good: but he wasn't thinking about it.

He picked a smooth stretch of sand, up above the tide-fringe of seaweed, and settled himself comfortably for a distracting review of his memories of Anamaria. Oh, she'd known how to handle that little boat of hers! And so suspicious of him, even when he'd only been sitting at the end of the pier, watching her bring in the ... the _Jolly Mon_, that'd been her name.

"What you lookin' at?"

"Your lovely boat, and her charming skipper, of course!" Jack'd called, springing to his feet and sweeping her a courtly low bow (a little lower than he'd intended, because of the rum).

And somehow she'd turned common courtesy into an offer to help her unload her catch: but he'd turned _that_ around into an invitation to share a couple of the best fish, grilled on a hot stone on the beach, and another couple of bottles. And then, ooooh, then ... Jack's hand was on himself, but try as he might he couldn't capture the feel of _her_ hand, at once hesitant and strong, or the taste of her mouth that made him hungry for so many things, or the way she just _took_ him, strong and capable and sure of what she wanted as any man, but soft in all the right places and suitably appreciative of his hardness. And the way she'd cried out, at the end, and lifted herself up off him so that his seed had spattered all creamy over her hard flat stomach --

Jack sighed, a long sad sigh, and began to scrub his hand clean in the sand. Poor Anamaria. She couldn't have survived. She was as lost as his _Pearl_, and he was sorry for it.

He'd wanted to stay, really he had: he'd almost left it too late, the crossing to Port Royal, and it'd been sheer luck that he'd only caught the tail-end of the storm. The compass had spun and spun, and so in truth had the _Jolly Mon_: Jack hadn't dared to sleep, so much at the mercy of wind and wave in such a little boat, and anyway the fear of waking with a lungful of green water -- or never waking at all -- had kept him bolt upright at the helm.

"You didn't get me then," he told the waves, "and you shan't have me now."

The waves rolled on, indifferent.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Ten: In Which Norrington Stays On Board

  


* * *

"You're not going ashore, captain?"

"I like it better here," said Anamaria, as though he'd accused her of laziness.

"I always prefer ... preferred ... to stay aboard myself," said Norrington, folding his hands behind his back and looking out over the water towards the quayside taverns. He'd hoped, aloud, that they would be sailing directly to Georgetown, but Anamaria had insisted that she had business in Tortuga. Norrington eyed the infamous pirate haven with distaste. Neither the Spanish nor the French had been at all successful at clearing it out.

"You don't want a drink and a girl, Mr Norrington?"

"Not especially," said Norrington brusquely, finding her bluntness quite distasteful. Then, aware that he'd been rude, he proffered a smile. "I suppose I fell out of the habit of sharing my shore leave with the common sailors."

He'd annoyed her. "No different to you, are they?" she snapped.

"Madame," said Norrington after a moment's thought, "if you are trying to provoke me then you've succeeded: I implore you to be merciful. If I've mistaken --"

But Anamaria was laughing. "No mistake, Captain," she said, and he realised with a start that she had left off goading him with his lack of rank. "But let's cry peace, at least for tonight."

"Very well," said Norrington, stumbling slightly as he turned to shake her outstretched hand. "Pax."

Anamaria gave him another suspicious look -- damn, the woman probably had no idea of Latin, or proper form, or _anything_ \-- but she clasped his hand as firmly as any man, and her smile was luminous in the dusk.

"I suppose Jack Sparrow always went ashore with his crew," Norrington said idly, once they were settled on the quarterdeck of the _Maiden's Venture_ with a tankard of rum apiece.

"Why d'you say that?"

"He never seemed the sort to stand on ceremony," said Norrington. "Or to say no to -- how'd you put it? -- a drink and a girl."

"You reckon?" said Anamaria, gulping rum. "That's what he wanted everyone to think, sure. Sneaky wicked man, was Jack. You don't know the story? How I came to be crewing for him, when he got the _Pearl_ back?"

"There seem to be rather a lot of stories about Mr Sparrow," observed Norrington.

"True enough," said Anamaria. "He stole my boat."

Norrington glanced across. Her expression was more snarl than smile.

"I didn't hear that one," he said, feeling like Pandora opening her box of woes.

"I had some nice business going," said Anamaria, each word smoother-edged than the last. "A little bit of fishing here, a little rum-running there -- begging your pardon -- a little bit of carrying things where they wanted to be. Then 'long comes Jack, pretty rogue that he was with his beads and baubles and fancy words, all ..."

She poked her finger into the corner of her eye, fiercely.

"Well, you can guess the rest of that story. Old as the hills, ain't it?"

Norrington could guess it all too well. "I'm sorry," he said. "Was it ..."

But even though she was a pirate, and a coloured woman, he could not bring himself to ask about such intimate matters.

"Couple of weeks," said Anamaria, rather more huskily than before. She poured herself more rum, and did not offer the bottle to Norrington. "Long enough for me to think he was for real."

"And he sailed off in your boat," said Norrington. "How did --"

"Right in the middle of the stormy weather, too!" said Anamaria furiously. "Like he couldn't stand to stay even jus' till the storms were past. An' he knew that weather, in those waters: none better. I'd not have taken her out in that sea, so he knew I wouldn't be after him any time soon, even if I'd found another boat to take. Fool's luck." She leaned forward and spat.

"What happened to her?"

"Bottom of Port Royal harbour, he told me," said Anamaria bleakly, staring straight ahead at the lights of the town.

"She's in good company down there," said Norrington. "After the _Black Pearl_ came through, and the French."

"Well, the _Pearl_ won't be sending any more to the depths," said Anamaria. The tear on her face caught the last of the light, and Norrington wanted to wipe it away, but he could easily imagine her reaction: and her voice was as fierce as ever.

And besides, the meaning of her words had penetrated the rum and the fatigue and a light haze of lust that had something to do with the thought of Jack Sparrow embracing the woman beside him.

"The _Black Pearl_'s ..." he began. "Anamaria, has something -- has the _Black Pearl_ been captured?"

Anamaria stared at him. It was too dark to read anything in her eyes. "You didn't know," she said at last. "You never heard."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Eleven: In Which Jack Sings to the Mermaids

  


* * *

Jack remembered the cold, cutting into his bones like a saw until he thought he'd lost his leg. Anything but the sting of the huge, circular weals on his thigh, where he had been held and then (why?) let go.

He thought he remembered an argument. A woman's voice, implacable, telling him to let go, to go back. Or had she been speaking to him at all? It had sounded nothing like Elizabeth. He liked the dreams about Elizabeth, and she sounded kinder than that. Nothing like Anamaria, either, though _she_ was likelier dead, and thus able to speak in his dreams.

He remembered someone bringing him fire, and thanking them for it: but he could not remember who it had been. They hadn't done anything about his leg, damn it, and they hadn't brought him rum, or food, or anything to wrap around himself. But he supposed he should be grateful. He had fire.

But outside the circle of firelight the night pressed in on him. It had glowing blue eyes, all in a row. He could feel their cold assessing stare, sizing him up, finding him wanting. The strand was very quiet, beneath the ceaseless rush of the sea. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something move, but it stilled when he turned to face it.

He had never been alone for this long before. His voice, when he spoke, sounded weak and afraid against the echoing distance around the island. How far was he from land? The night drew his courage out of him, and mocked it. He dared not sleep.

After moonset, the fire burnt low. He crouched over it with a handful of spindrift and dried kelp, doling out fuel like a prisoner's meals. His damaged leg ached like hell.

The shadows between the flames leaned closer, like the shadows in the fog the day the _Pearl_ went down. He swore at the shadows, but his voice was eaten up by the empty night.

The signal fires he built at the top of the island were made with green wood, which smokes fiercely when it burns. He remembered the rum, and Elizabeth, and her thousand-foot signal fire: that made him sing the song she'd taught him, and the sound of singing brought the mermaids out on the rocks at the end of the bay.

"No bloody Norrington coming to _my_ rescue, now is there?" Jack addressed them. But then he wasn't a slip of a girl in her petticoat -- though the linen of his shirt was wearing as delicately thin as muslin. And Norrington had been saving his lady-love from the clutches of a fearsome pirate captain, which didn't apply here.

Although, in a way, it did.

The mermaids giggled and pointed, and tried to sing along. Because of the smoke, he couldn't see them very clearly, but they were the dark-scaled kind, and they flopped around lewdly on the slippery rocks.

"Nasty creatures," said Jack, under his breath. "Get your scaly tails away." He had a vague memory of clawed hands and sharp teeth: but he had a great many vague memories, and he liked them vague. Some rum would help with that.

"Bloody Elizabeth!" he yelled suddenly, startling the mermaids back into the water. None of them saw him wipe his face, cursing.

"Smoke," he explained, to the air.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twelve: In Which Norrington Learns the Pearl's Fate

  


* * *

Norrington felt sick, and it wasn't from the rum; he took another drink, to settle the queasiness that had risen in his gut. He wanted to tell Anamaria about the Mission and the nuns and the awful fever-dreams; but he wanted to hear what had become of his old nemesis, the _Black Pearl_. Or was it Jack Sparrow whose fate he so urgently needed to know?

"I've heard nothing of her since ... since before the war," he said.

"We were cruising off Hispaniola," said Anamaria. "It was Jack Sparrow found the _Maiden's Glory_ for me. He promised he'd give me another ship, and it weren't ever going to be the _Pearl_: he loved that ship too much to give her up again. We came on the _Maiden_ with a crew of six, all of 'em Dutchmen, sailing her empty back to Curaçao after she'd been plundered by a Spanish privateer."

Norrington raised his eyebrows. Anamaria chuckled.

"Not a penny left, or anything but a couple of casks of water. They were half-dead from eatin' just what they could catch."

"What happened to them?" asked Norrington, aware that he was putting off the moment when the real story began.

"Jack Sparrow? Ha! He _paid_ 'em -- paid 'em! -- for their ship, and gave 'em the chance of staying on under a woman." Anamaria thumped the V of bare skin at the base of her throat, drawing Norrington's eyes. "They could sail under me, or under Jack -- for he let some of the _Pearl_'s crew come along with me, seein' as how they'd shown they weren't afraid to take my orders -- or he'd drop 'em at the nearest friendly port."

"And then?" prompted Norrington, leaning over with a grunt to help himself to more of the rum.

"Dropped off their captain and his mate in Willemstad," said Anamaria. "Took care of some business, and Jack, he heard some story about a Spanish treasure-ship coming up from south of the line. Last year, this'd be, or the one before: before any of them battles, before this war of yours started."

Norrington let that pass. "And not even Sparrow, surely, could have got through all the gold from the _Black Pearl_'s hoard," he mused.

Anamaria snorted. What an unfeminine sound! Norrington was fascinated. "Not for want of trying," she said. "We must all have our share, and the _Pearl_ must have new shrouds and canvas and paint and this'n'that ... You'd think she was his girl for real! But no, Jack set his mind on this treasure-ship, sailing north from Rio or some place. So we're down off Recife, out a ways, both of us -- him in the _Pearl_, me in the _Maiden's Glory_ \--" She thumped the deck. "Cruising back and forth and back and forth to find this _Santa Isabella_."

"And ...?"

"We never found her," Anamaria said. "Never saw another ship all that month. Sailed far enough apart to cover half the map, but no sight of any Spanish galleon. Then one day there came a terrible fog. Rolled up out of nowhere like a huge wave comin' in off the sea."

Norrington made a sympathetic noise. He'd been fog-bound, mid-Atlantic: a terrible desolate place, full of strange noises and the risk of being carried astray by capricious currents, fetching up on uncharted reefs or becalmed for weeks.

"Fog lifted the next morning," said Anamaria flatly, "and we never saw the _Black Pearl_ again."

"She might have been --"

"We never saw her again, Captain Norrington," said Anamaria, her voice hard and dull like an axe-blade after too much use. "But we saw the wreckage. We saw the bodies."

"Sparrow?" said Norrington, with a strange eagerness.

"We never found Jack," said Anamaria softly. "But there's sharks out in those waters. What we hauled out, more oft' than not, was scraps. Sometimes a bit with a tattoo, or a scar." She swallowed. "Even Jack couldn't talk his way --"

This time Norrington did her the courtesy of looking away while she mastered herself.

"Did you love him?" he asked, and cursed himself for a fool even while the words were coming out.

"Love Jack?" That made Anamaria laugh, a sound so unexpected that Norrington found himself smiling too.

She was shaking her head. "Love Jack Sparrow? That's a fool's business. Man betrayed me: stole my boat. Pretty smile, for sure, and oooh, those hands!" She cast a devilish sideways look at Norrington, who choked on the rum he was swallowing. "We were lovers, time to time. But love? Nah."

Again, the image of the two of them together -- Jack's skin unexpectedly light against Anamaria's, the pirate flat on his back as Anamaria sank down onto him -- wormed its way into Norrington's mind.

"Who're you thinking about, then?"

Damn the woman. She'd shifted closer to him, close enough that she had only to glance aside to see definite physical evidence of _what_ he was thinking.

Not that it mattered. Reckless with rum, Norrington tilted his head back until he could look Anamaria in the eye. "Absent friends," he decided.

"You want to make friends wherever you are," said Anamaria, and with a slowness that Norrington thought was kindly meant -- giving him a last chance to escape -- she closed the last of the distance between them.

Her kiss tasted of warm rum, and slightly of salt from the tears she had tried not to let him see. Tears for Jack, thought Norrington, and then: it's not over.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Thirteen: In Which Jack Performs Sea-Burial

  


* * *

Jack had spent most of the day hauling a huge, dead monster along the beach to the place where the current pulled hard away from the rocks. He didn't want to live with the stench of rotting flesh, or the ceaseless screeching of gulls, or the idea that whatever had left such appalling wounds on the creature might come back for _him_.

Whatever-it-was had probably been graceful, down there in the dark: its many veiled limbs spreading through the water like the skirts of a lady's dress, its single eye glowing like a gentle lamp, its skin rippling with patterns like the ceiling above his bed, that time in Singapore with the opium-pipe. Cast up on the sand, it was lumpish and grey and ugly. Very dead: Jack had heaved a few rocks at it, ready to turn and run if it moved, but eventually he had conceded that it was out of its element and dead from the weight of the air, if nothing else.

"Marooned like me," he told the stinking, heavy monster as he fastened a precious, much-spliced length of rope around its slippery hide. "Cast ashore with no way home." Self-pity came easily to Jack these days, but since there was no one else around to lavish sympathy on him, he deemed it fair enough.

The brute weighed a ton, and he was weaker than he'd been before the wreck: seaweed and fish and berries were a fine diet, to be sure, but he felt as thin and sinewy as he'd been when the curse took hold of him. No muscle on his bones to move the monster more than a few feet at a time, even with the sweat pouring off him in rivulets. The corpse acquired a thick batter of sand and seaweed as he dragged it behind him, and it left a broad track along the beach. He hoped there was nothing behind him to follow that track. The blood, or whatever it was, that oozed from the creature's wounds was black, and tasted foul. There were circular scars on its skin, like smaller copies of the purple weal on his leg, and its own limbs were lined with little round suckers like an octopus's: but this was no octopus, quite aside from its abnormal size.

By late afternoon he'd got the corpse onto the rocks at the end of the beach. No mermaids today: he hoped they wouldn't be too pissed off at him for using their bathing-place to dispose of carrion. Getting the rope off the creature was a tricky business, and he almost ended up following it into the wicked tidal race; but he braced himself against the sharp-edged reef, and the monster slipped back into the ocean. Back into its element.

Jack was exhausted, and a great deal of the slime and sand had transferred itself to his own skin. He wanted to bathe in fresh water, but the spring was hardly sufficient for drinking: nothing to spare. There were thunderclouds on the horizon: perhaps they'd blow this way and unload their rain on his little kingdom.

He wriggled out of his breeches, or what was left of 'em, and splashed about in the surf for a while, luxuriating (since it was the best he could get) in the sensation of cool water splashing over his sun-scorched skin. A shoal of fry darted in the clear water, quick as any mirage, swimming straight at him like slow, gentle bullets; he played with them for a while, until he saw the sleek curve of a fin, out by the reef, and decided to take himself ashore before anything decided that he was dinner.

The thunderclouds were taller and darker now: there'd be a storm for sure. After the last bit o' weather, Jack'd moved his hut higher up the beach, further from the tideline: he was surely safe from the sea. And maybe the gigantic grey waves, the irresistable gale, would bring him salvation: a fleet, a single ship, even wreckage that might be built into a boat of his own. He'd sail west, for surely that way lay Brazil: or he'd sign whatever Articles, Code, Book was presented to him, and go where he was taken. Anywhere but here. Any company that was not his own.

"Bloody Elizabeth, rescued as easy as kiss your hand," said Jack bitterly to the horizon. "Ain't Captain Jack Sparrow worth two of that girl?"

The horizon, all blurred by the approaching storm, gave him no answers.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Fourteen: In Which Norrington Dreams of Pirates

  


* * *

In the way of dreams, he'd known that although the person in bed with him _seemed_ to be Anamaria, she was _really_ Elizabeth. 'Twas all a trick of the light, or something: for surely even his sleeping mind could not conflate the two women to this extreme.

Yet perhaps it wasn't so very extreme a notion after all. Elizabeth was more pirate than her husband would ever be, even though _her_ father had been the respected Governor of Port Royal, and _his_ (or so they said, in the taverns) a notorious pirate who'd sailed with Sparrow, back before the advent of Barbossa. Yet Elizabeth -- striking accords with Barbossa, with Sparrow, with Norrington himself, like a pirate to the manner born -- had that ruthless streak to her which had appalled Will Turner and attracted James Norrington. He remembered her as a little girl, fascinated by pirate-stories.

She and Anamaria would've liked one another, he thought, coming gradually awake. Maybe they'd met, back during that business with the curse.

There was more to the dream, and he clung on to the last shreds. That mouth, all hot and wet and delicious, and the flash of gold catching the morning...

But Anamaria didn't have gold teeth. He was nearly certain of that. And -- oh.

Some of the dream, at least, was no dream at all.

Norrington opened his eyes and looked down over an expanse of fair skin (his own) and dark skin (_hers_) to where a wicked mouth was playing havoc with his sense of reality.

Anamaria winked at him, and Norrington tried to laugh, but she'd stolen his breath away. (Pirate!)

And really, he could hardly ask her to open her mouth so that he could check her teeth. Not now. Even if she was a pirate, a woman, a mulatto, she was still the captain (the pirate captain) of the ship on which he was, for the present, a mere passenger.

She was in his bed -- in fact, he recalled, he was in hers -- and her mouth ... her body ... her hands. He'd kissed her (oh, and more, much more) last night: he'd held onto her, sunken into her, spilled out in her, and watched her take as much pleasure from him as he'd had from her, equal and open and honest and happy. And oh, so long since he'd let himself be so overtaken by sensation: so long since he'd felt so free. Just for a moment everything that mattered, duty and history and rank and the war, dropped away, and James Norrington was simply and purely himself. It felt like a liberation.

He was trying to remember something about Jack Sparrow when his body overtook him and he spent, hard and noisily, in her mouth.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Fifteen: In Which Jack Listens to the Rain

  


* * *

The rain came at dawn, and the din of it -- not to mention the sensation of warm water dripping onto his face -- woke Jack Sparrow. For a moment he lay there dumbly, recreating the previous day from the various aches in his body. He'd hauled a monster's corpse for miles: washed off the worst of the sand, sweat and blood from himself in the sea: sung to the absent mermaids, as a sort of apology: staggered back here and feasted on a lavish array of dried fish, fresh seaweed, coconut milk and coconut: and fallen into a sleep that had, mercifully, been dreamless.

His leg ached.

All in all, a typical morning on the Isle with No Name. But the rain was bucketing busily down outside -- and, to a lesser extent, inside -- his little hut, and the palm-leaves would need replacing, and he'd better set out every shell, sea- and coconut-, to catch the water, and --

_Fresh water_.

Jack sprang naked from his bed and pushed aside the vine-curtain that kept the insects away. The sky was grey and heavy, and the clouds seemed close enough to touch. The rain came down diagonally in wide silver bars, and Jack cavorted merrily in it for a while, face upturned to drink the rain as it fell, feeling his parched skin soak it up and turn from dry leather to supple silk once more.

'Twasn't natural to be so dessicated, not in the middle of the deep blue sea.

Oh, the rain felt like a lover's caress. Jack closed his eyes and pretended that the storm was touching him with intent, teasing and sliding and ticking wherever it could reach: torrents of dark water clinging to his nipples and navel, drumming like gentle fingers on his collarbone, his belly, his cock. He laughed aloud when he felt himself hardening; a shame, because he'd caught himself out and spoilt the mood, but it just went to show it was all in the mind.

He cupped his fingers and drank the water that pooled in his palm, and grinned again at the sensation of his own warm tongue against his skin.

Maybe if it rained enough, the island would slip its moorings and float away into the ocean. Maybe the winds that had brought the rainclouds this way would bring flotsam and jetsam too, the makings of a boat. Sure, a ship was freedom; but it was a practical thing too, a bridge from here to the places where other people lived. A bridge to carry him beyond the horizon; a horizon which (Jack spun to a halt, swallowing hard against nausea, and cocked his hand above his eyes to keep off the rain) had crept much closer in the grey morning.

He'd given up counting the days of his exile long ago. For one thing, he had no idea of how long he'd been out of his mind with fever and pain. But now Jack was suddenly sure of how long he'd been alone in this trap.

Too long.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Sixteen: In Which Norrington is Irritated

  


* * *

The _Ariel_'s long refit was finally complete, and Norrington was pleased -- and, privately, touched -- to find that his crew were all still waiting for him in Georgetown (Stabroek, the Dutch called it), despite the good wages offered by the Dutch Navy to any who'd sail against Louis' fleets. He wouldn't have blamed the men: it'd been a long time to lie idle, chafing at the knowledge that they'd been cast away.

There was little news, and most of it bad. One bright fragment: old Swann, Elizabeth's father, had found himself a post in the Danish government. One report even mentioned his daughter and son-in-law, alive and well in Copenhagen. Norrington chuckled, wondering what the headstrong couple would make of European diplomacy. Not to mention the weather; Elizabeth had always hated the rain.

But when he thought of Elizabeth he thought of Anamaria, though he had stopped telling himself that they were worlds apart: and when he thought of Anamaria, Jack Sparrow would, more often than not, sidle into his mind, all gleam and curve and shine like a counterfeit coin.

Norrington had at once dreaded and hoped for the day when he would bid farewell to Anamaria. It was not that he found their liaison distasteful or unwelcome: on the contrary, it felt as though Anamaria had unlocked some self-imprisoned part of him that had been forgotten for too long. He'd never thought that he would take -- 'be taken by', he amended the thought, with a wry smile and a renewed surge of lust -- a dark-skinned pirate woman for a lover. On board the _Maiden's Glory_, Norrington had been happy to stop planning and calculating, happy to let life wash over him and bring what it would. He had never been able to live like that before, caught up in a net of Navy rules and regulations: England had expected everything of him and he had given it willingly.

What Anamaria had seemed to expect was quite different, and perhaps it was for that reason that he'd abandoned propriety and politeness and let his baser self guide him. He blushed -- actually, it was more the echo of a blush, the way the man he'd been a year ago would have blushed -- to think of the things they had done, together, in her bed.

But bidding her farewell was another matter. He had begun to notice changes in himself: a passivity that sprang from being a mere passenger on another captain's ship, running cleanly down to Stabroek with a keen eye on other shipping, and every reason not to be caught. (Anamaria had not told him the nature of her cargo, though he helped haul some of it, sugar and silver, aboard from that French vessel. He had not asked what else was in the _Maiden_'s hold.) That was all very well, in its place, but Norrington was a man of action, and his self-declared war against the French would brook nothing less.

They had made their farewells, in private, the night before the _Maiden's Glory_ docked. It had been less than a week since he'd sat with Anamaria on deck and learnt of Jack Sparrow's fate. Somehow, between the hot looks and the daily business of eluding the enemy, Norrington had found himself thinking -- not constantly, but frequently -- of Sparrow. Thinking of his unmarked grave. Thinking of how he could make himself believe, for once and for all, that Jack Sparrow (who had somehow come to stand for a great deal more than any one pirate should embody) was dead.

Norrington held on to the idea, like an oyster holding onto a grain of sand. Rather, the idea held onto him. He had set himself the task of finding Jack, if he could be found: for it seemed impossible that someone so notorious would simply disappear in stormy weather, leaving so many stories half-finished. If he was dead, then Norrington would try to prove it: if he was alive, then Norrington would find him. It was a goal, albeit a modest one.

At least that was how it began. He had caught himself turning over epitaphs as he paced the quarterdeck: 'a pirate and a good man'. No, why qualify it? 'A good man'. Or, 'The friend I never knew' (this after an uncommonly bad night, and the burial at sea of a sailor who'd served with him, from ship to ship, for years). Rapidly following that, 'A Bloody Nuisance'.

Eventually he began to realise that he hoped to find Jack alive.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Seventeen: In Which Jack Finds Himself Back in the Brig

  


* * *

Once the rain had stopped falling and started turning into steam, it became unpleasant to stay outside, under the heavy grey sky. Jack retreated to the hut and lay on the pile of straw, plaited grass and rags that he called a bed. Eyes open, he could stare out at grey waves, grey clouds, a beach striped with grey and decorated with snot-green seaweed, and a curtain of mist blurring everything. Eyes closed, he could be anywhere: back in the brig of the _Dauntless_, let's say, on that long (not long enough) voyage back from Isla de Muerta to the gallows. The brig here is clean and new and dry -- no graffiti, a vague and evenly-distributed reek of tar rather than piss -- and he's all alone.

Then the glimmer of a lantern: Norrington, of course, come to check on his prize. "Turn around, face the wall," he commands from behind the circle of light. Then, "put your hands up; yes, just there, like that."

There's the noise of the key grinding in the lock: then Jack, all boneless obedience if it'll keep him alive, feels the closeness of another body. The Commodore's in the brig with him; he's set down the lantern; his breath is warmer than the ambient air, and Jack can feel it on his neck.

"I've decided," he says softly right next to Jack's ear, "to see for myself whether there's any truth in the stories."

"What stories?" says Jack, as though the feel of Norrington's hard prick pressing up against the cleft of his arse doesn't tell him _exactly_ which rumours have, however improbably, reached the Commodore's freshly-washed ears.

"The stories about your prowess with women -- and with men." The Commodore sounds a little -- well, a little stiff. Perhaps he's not used to talking of such things. Perhaps he's distracted, like Jack, by the way their hips rock together. "The stories that say you're insatiable. That you're impossible to satisfy. That no one can master you."

Jack wants to argue these points, no matter how true they are, but the Commodore shuts him up by sticking his fingers in Jack's mouth, which gives him something to do while he's moaning and gasping at the feel of the Commodore's other hand unfastening his breeches, letting them drop so that Jack's naked from the waist down. He's propped his forehead against the wall between his two hands, sucking hard on the Commodore's fingers to get them nice and wet, and to give the Commodore some ideas about what he could do with his mouth on other portions of the Commodorial anatomy.

There's a lot of touching, then, all caught up in a big rush that leaves Jack aching and shaking and not afraid to plead for Norrington to fuck him, hard and deep and fast and now. Though when the Commodore tightens his hold on Jack's hips and pushes in firmly -- and in, and in -- Jack's almost breathless with choking on his own cries. Norrington's big, and it's a long time since he's been on the receiving end of this particular transaction, and the Commodore is showing him about as much mercy as Jack can expect without Miss Swann to plead his case, which is to say none at all. And it doesn't help that after every stroke Norrington pulls almost all the way out, so that only the broad head of his prick stays inside Jack, stretching him: then a heart-stopping wait, like being at the edge of a cliff, Jack writhing and begging and Norrington cool as anything, until he relents and plunges back in. Every time it feels as though he's going deeper, as though his prick is getting longer and fatter and altogether even more of a good thing, and Jack is completely undone, and it goes on.

After a while, even Norrington is affected by the astonishing heat and grasp and slide of Jack's arse, and he's murmuring endearments into Jack's ear. "Love the way you take it, take it all," he says, hand pressing at the base of Jack's prick in a way that's just the right side of painful. "Going to keep you for myself. Too good for hanging."

This is so entirely in accord with Jack's own views on the subject that he can hardly protest. Instead he shows his agreement by twisting and bucking against the hardness that's impaling him.

"Going to strip you naked and lock away your clothes. Keep you in my cabin, ready for whenever I want to have you," says Norrington thickly, a promise rather than a threat, into Jack's ear. He bites the earlobe as punctuation, and Jack jerks against another hard thrust. "Maybe," says James (Jack decides he's allowed to be on first-name terms: it's his fantasy, after all), "maybe I'll even let you show me whether you give as good as you get." And then he's pounding even harder into Jack, heavy against Jack's shoulders, gasping, "Come for me, Jack." And Jack, unbelievably, does as he's commanded; he comes without the Commodore's hand loosening its hold, and the result's a spasm so hard that it hurts.

Back on the beach, the sun had come out, and there was sand blowing past the doorway of the hut, almost horizontally. Jack's right hand was cramping, and he wanted to wash, but the thought of being lacerated by flying sand made him decide that cleanliness could wait. He flopped onto his back and sighed heavily. Wondered where the Commodore was now: pestering some poor sod just trying to grab a living from an unfriendly world, no doubt, or harassing another bunch of rum-runners into giving up business and settling down in some slummy fishing-village.

Jack grinned at the thought of Norrington seeing one of his signals, changing course for his little island, and coming across Captain Jack Sparrow in the aftermath of one of his more entertaining diversions. He could just imagine the Commodore's expression. "The one that got away," he murmured, circling a finger idly in the sticky mess on his stomach.

But then, of course, he'd never have the appeal for the Commodore that bloody Elizabeth had possessed. With any luck, of course, the Commodore would have found himself a nice young wife to take the edge off all that earnest rectitude.

Jack smiled again, reminiscently, and wrapped the remains of his shirt around his hips before he ventured out into the wind.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Eighteen: In Which Norrington Checks His Charts

  


* * *

The _Ariel_ was cruising a hundred miles or so south-south-east of Recife, hunting the _Rosalie_ (formerly the _Rose_); a 30-gun sloop whose captain had proven more the gentleman than most French officers. The men were in good spirits. The _Ariel_ had engaged a French galleon, the _Ferdinand_, and sent her down with all hands. Norrington deplored the loss of life, but this was war (never mind that he had no orders, not even a letter of marque, to say so) and an enemy ship was fair prey.

Besides, as soon as the French knew that a lone English frigate was harrying their ships, the tables would turn, and the _Ariel_ would be prey. Norrington the man might wish to be merciful; Norrington the strategist knew that it was a human weakness he couldn't afford.

Instead, he had men at the masthead day and night, scanning the broad blue bowl of sea for pale slivers of sail. Looking too, though they didn't know it, for a signal; for any sign of life out here in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Whenever he thought of Sparrow signalling, Norrington had to force back a smile. Elizabeth's no-nonsense approach to lighting a beacon had enraged the pirate beyond measure; Norrington could still remember the scowls the two had exchanged when they'd thought he wasn't watching them. Things had been simpler then, and the _Dauntless_'s journey back to Port Royal -- Sparrow in the brig, Elizabeth smiling and radiant at Norrington's side as though she truly _wished_ to marry the Commodore -- had been almost like a holiday.

Thinking of that voyage tended to make Norrington unusually irritable, though his temper had improved in recent months. Perhaps it was the fact of having a pirate to hunt again, this time not for hanging but for ... Norrington was not sure what he'd do with Jack Sparrow, if he found him; if Sparrow were still alive. Pick Sparrow's brains for any knowledge, be it ports or people or nefarious tricks, that might mean another small defeat for France; engage Sparrow in his private war; simply leave Sparrow where he found him, if that would make for a quieter life.

Sparrow would be back in the Caribbean by now, sneaking his way past Norrington just as he'd done before. Or he'd be living incognito -- no, not incognito; liked the sound of his own voice, and his absurd stories, too much -- in one of those pretty Brazilian ports. There were no islands this far from the coast; apart from the specklings of small, rocky islands up near the Equator (so poorly rendered on the old Admiralty chart that Norrington scraped at them with his thumbnail in case they were actually mouse-droppings or mould) there was nothing between the coast of Brazil and Ascension Island. Nowhere for a pirate, even Jack Sparrow, to hide; nowhere for a shipwrecked sailor to find rest.

He hadn't realised that he was waiting, _expecting_, until they'd been out of sight of land for three days. Then -- just as Anamaria had told him, in the tale that Norrington profoundly hoped his crew had _not_ heard in any of the taverns between Port Royal and Rio de Janeiro -- a fog rolled in from nowhere ("from the south," amended Norrington, scribbling in the log) and suddenly they were alone, becalmed, and blind.

Norrington squinted into the pearly grey sky as the fog began to lift, hoping to find the disk of silver that, in this dull weather, would mark the sun. He had no idea of the time of day, but if he could determine noon --

"Land on the starboard bow!" yelled the lookout. Half a dozen of the men on deck rushed to the starboard rail. Norrington didn't join them. He listened hard. There? There. Like a heartbeat, the crashing of waves against solid rock.

"But there's nothing on the map!" cried Bailey. "Nothing at all 'twixt Recife and Bahia!"

"Here be monsters," Norrington murmured to himself. "I wonder...."

When the lookout cried "Smoke -- a signal!" Norrington nodded, for it seemed to him that he'd known it would be there.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Nineteen: In Which Jack Makes a Wish

  


* * *

It would have suited him better if he'd been dreaming of Norrington when the _Ariel_ rounded the headland. In fact he had been telling himself the beginning of a new story about Elizabeth, and it was the imagined sound of her voice saying his name -- not in exasperation or cajolery, but soft and insistent -- that was cut off, drowned out, by his own astonished cry of "Ship!"

The _ship_. The ship, all white slackening canvas and faint echoing commands, the splash of the bow anchor heaved overboard, the larger splash of the cutter being lowered to the water.

There were people on the ship. Men. Strangers. Was that not an English flag at the masthead?

Jack Sparrow wished for a mirror. Like every other wish he'd made since waking on this barren shore, it went ungranted. Every other wish until now.

He wanted to run and hide. He wanted to unwish them, after all, and have them come again when he was better prepared. He wanted to greet them grandly, lord of his small domain, and have their respect from the moment they met him. Instead, he must play beggar for a way away from here; an escape; a rescue.

Jack stood before his hut and watched them come ashore in their long-boat. The tall man in front seemed familiar at first, but he walked with an ugly wrenching limp -- much worse than his own -- that made Jack wince to see it. He wore simple breeches and a grubby shirt, not the uniform that somebody like Commodore Norrington would have worn for such an auspicious occasion. Jack's hands clenched on the compass, but it swung no less wildly than before.

And yet: it _was_.

"Jack Sparrow?" he said, halting a couple of steps in front of Jack. The voice was all wrong. Not how Jack remembered it at all. He sounded ... Jack couldn't be sure. Too long away from the sound of other voices. Was Norrington pleased, or horrified, or …

"Jack ... it _is_ you, isn't it?"

Jack, with a supreme effort, remembered how to smile. "Captain Jack Sparrow, at your service."

Norrington reached out for his hand, and Jack flinched.

"Never thought you'd be the first person I touched after a year, mate," he said, and felt a brief, nostalgic flare of delight at Norrington's raised eyebrows.

He clasped the Commodore's hand, still half-expecting Norrington to seize him again and examine him for new brandings, scars and distinguishing marks. ... There. Not so difficult, is it, Jack? But Norrington's hand felt wrong. Too dry. Too hot. His grip tightened on Jack, not letting him pull away, and Jack felt himself begin to panic.

"It's true, about the _Black Pearl_?" said Norrington quietly, looking directly into Jack's eyes as though he might yet see her image, in miniature, reflected there.

"Gone," said Jack, rocking back on his heels so that he could look away more easily. "Dragged to the depths."

"I'm sorry." Norrington bowed his head for a moment, respectful-like. "And the ... your crew?"

"Full fathom five," said Jack with an empty smile. "And I only escaped to tell thee."

"You've been here alone for a year?" Norrington's voice rose sharply.

"The mermaids come up to pass the time when the tide's right," said Jack. "Nasty scaly harlots."

The rest of Norrington's crew had backed off a little, giving them some privacy. Jack gestured at them. "Not worried that the fearsome pirate'll slit your gizzard, are they?"

"They probably think you're mad," said Norrington calmly. "They're afraid it's contagious."

"Course I'm mad, mate," said Jack, aware of a curious choking sensation. It might have been laughter, or something less acceptable. "I've lost my love."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty: In Which Norrington Makes a Discovery"

  


* * *

It was just as he'd somehow known it would be: Sparrow was here, at the end of the world, and madder than ever. Why else would he be squinting at Norrington (holding back a handful of dark hair, even more ridiculously long and decorated than it had been when he'd tipped himself over the parapet at Fort Charles; three years since, or near enough, it must be now) and clutching that broken compass in his hand as though it would show him the way home?

Sparrow beamed at him suddenly, and the Commodore found himself smiling back as though he were genuinely pleased to see the man. After all, he hadn't wished Sparrow dead. The Turners, if he ever got word to Copenhagen, would be glad to know he was alive. And for now, at least, Norrington had no reason for, and no intention of, stringing up Jack Sparrow for piracy. If he'd been marooned alone here ever since the _Black Pearl_ went down -- a year, if the stories were true -- he must have been forced to live lawfully.

Norrington chuckled at that thought, and Jack Sparrow sauntered back over to him as if this were a chance encounter on the quayside at Port Royal and not a desolate island in the middle of the white space on his charts.

"Nice of you to visit, Commodore."

"You're a lucky man, Sparrow."

"That's _Captain_ Sparrow," said the pirate, impertinently, and Norrington's lips thinned.

"Your ship --" he began, but it seemed cruel to remind Jack, if he'd (how could he have?) forgotten.

Sparrow looked down at his bare, tanned feet for a moment: then back up at Norrington. His eyes were less readable than ever. "How did you find me?"

"A whim," snapped Norrington, before any of the men behind him could interject some superstitious nonsense. "When we found this uncharted island, it stood to reason that you'd have ended up here."

"Commodore --"

"Mr Sparrow," said Norrington sharply, and for once Jack did not correct him, "there have been some changes, while you've been sunning yourself on this charming isle."

No point in trying to soften the news, or pretend that it meant nothing. No point, either, in carrying on this little farce of Commodore and pirate. And he wanted to see Jack's reaction; which meant telling him now, before he'd had time to remember how to hide his feelings once again.

"The Royal Navy's given up shooting their little guns at every pirate they fancy they see, and you've all turned privateer yourselves?" guessed Sparrow, with that ingratiating smile that Norrington remembered from their first meeting.

"Be quiet, Sparrow, and listen."

Jack Sparrow looked at him, and Norrington could see him recognise the gravity in his voice. The pirate nodded once. "'M all ears."

"King Carlos died. The King of Spain."

Sparrow shrugged. "Didn't know the bloke!" he protested, at Norrington's scowl. "Not personally."

"Sparrow --"

Jack spread his hands. "I'm listening!"

"The King of Spain died, and he had no heir, so he left his empire to France."

Jack whistled. "Nice. My aunt left me a prayer book and --"

Norrington continued as though Sparrow had not begun to chatter; understandable after a year's solitude, he supposed, but inappropriate. "With the French empire, and the French fleet, doubled in size overnight, the English and the Dutch -- and most of the rest of Europe -- declared war."

"England's at war with France?" ventured Sparrow.

"England is not at war with anyone," said Norrington. "England is no more."

He'd more than half-expected some savage triumphal whoop, or a smirking remark that would give him the long-awaited opportunity to deck Jack Sparrow. But Sparrow looked him in the eye, and said only, "I'm sorry."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-One: In Which Jack Takes Sides

  


* * *

Jack had begun to notice things as soon as the ship dropped anchor. Item, nobody was in uniform. (A secret mission?) Item, the ship's sails were tattered, and her shrouds dull. (A long passage?) Item, Norrington was not wearing the Wig. (Divine Providence?) Item, nobody had clapped him in irons, and they'd been ashore five minutes at least. (He _was_ Captain Jack Sparrow, after all).

There was more that Norrington hadn't told him: he was nearly certain of that. He'd skimmed over whatever glorious naval engagement had left him with a leg that wouldn't bend. He hadn't said anything about Port Royal, or the Governor, or the Governor's charming daughter. He had not explained why he was here, on this uncharted island, in search -- in search? -- of Captain Jack Sparrow.

Norrington looked like a man who'd lost everything that mattered: and now Jack knew why.

Strange, to sit in the _Ariel_'s jolly-boat, watching the island -- _his_ island -- become separate from him, divided from him by a widening tranch of water. A year on solid land. A year in the same place. The gentle pitch and roll of the _Ariel_'s ever-so-clean deck beneath his bare feet felt like flight, rapture, rescue. Jack wished Norrington would shut up, just for a minute, and let him appreciate the sensation of being afloat once more. But Norrington was on about this war, and how it was over and yet not (Jack shook his head at this) and he kept looking at Jack as though he expected a sensible, informed response.

"And so," he was saying, "I have taken it upon myself to wage war upon the French -- and the Spanish, or what remains of them -- as long as I may."

"Begging your pardon," said Jack, with a contrite smile, "but you and whose navy?"

Norrington gestured at the _Ariel_'s crew. "I've a few good men, and there are many who are sympathetic to Old England, and everything that she stood for." His eyes, Jack could've sworn, went misty. "But there is always a need for more. More ships: more good men ..."

"I'd join you," Jack said, smoking it at last, "but I'm temporarily out of the pirating trade."

"You're siding with the French?" Norrington drew himself up. His eyes were certainly not misty now: no, they were the colour of the inside of an iceberg that had almost holed the _Black Pearl_ once, when they'd sailed far to the south. His fingers curled into a fist at his side. It was a long time since Jack had felt threatened by another man, and for a moment he mistook the sensation -- that rush of heat and energy and tautness -- for something quite different.

"I didn't say that!" Jack took a turn along the _Ariel_'s trim quarterdeck, wishing he still had a hat. "Can't side with anyone, can I?" He gestured. "No ship."

As he'd hoped, Norrington's expression softened.

"Captain Norrington -- may I call you Captain, for now? -- Captain Sparrow is at your disposal," said Jack, bowing grandly. "But I fear there's little I can do from my personal kingdom, here."

He gestured over his shoulder at the island. His island. His very small island.

"You want a ship," said Norrington.

"Of _course_ I want a ship," said Jack. "And once I've my own ship again -- though never as lovely as my dear _Pearl_, of course -- we might come to some accord."

"Do you imagine I have ships to give away?"

"Let me sail with you," said Jack. "I reckon between us we can find a ship or two that the French ain't using."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Two: In Which Anchor is Weighed

  


* * *

Sparrow had accepted Norrington's invitation gracefully; in fact, thought Norrington with exasperation, he'd hesitated as though staying on the island, alone, was a real choice. But he'd swung up from the jolly-boat and onto the deck like any sailor, not even staggering as he swayed into the gentle roll of the _Ariel_. A heavy swell had come up in the last hour, and Norrington was keen to leave the bay before the waves drove them onto the beach. Already four men were at the capstan, hauling up the anchor, and others were raising the mainsail.

Once the _Ariel_ was slipping past the vicious reefs at the mouth of the bay -- had they been the _Black Pearl_'s nemesis, in the end? -- Norrington gave the helm to Bailey and went aft to the quarterdeck. Sparrow stood at the stern, leaning on the taffrail and gazing at the island as it receded. He had probably never seen it whole before. Norrington had seen the map in the sand, and seen Sparrow deliberately scuff it to oblivion with his bare feet. A year was a long time.

And Sparrow was at once unchanged and wholly different. There was more of the pirate to him than ever; hair wilder, limbs more sinewy and sunburnt, clothes more tattered (Norrington reminded himself to find some decent garments for the man), manner more extravagant than before. Yet he had looked Norrington in the eye, grave and unshifting, and they had recognised something in one another.

What was he going to do with Jack Sparrow? He'd asked Bailey to give up his cabin and take the spare bunk in Smith the purser's cabin: Smith wouldn't mind, for he and Bailey were both easy-going, good-natured men, if not particular friends. It would not be appropriate for Sparrow to sling his hammock with the common seamen, and Norrington was by no means sure of his sanity. Men had gone mad after less time alone.

Sparrow would have a cabin to himself; he'd eat well tonight (Norrington had ordered the last goat slaughtered, and he didn't begrudge Sparrow a rum ration); he'd have clean clothes, and Norrington would sit him down with charts and the last newspapers from London, if he cared to know how England had gone down.

And then what?

He'd rescued Jack Sparrow from a life, and a death, alone and unknown. No need (Norrington smiled to himself) for an epitaph; which meant that he could stop worrying over the wording, in the small hours of the night. And there was still the _Rosalie_ to find; Sparrow might be a year out of practice, but he could still wave a cutlass threateningly enough.

"Something funny, Norrington?"

The pirate -- but _was_ he a pirate, now? -- had left the taffrail and was at his side. His bare feet ('must find him shoes', thought Norrington) had made no sound on the bleached deck. Norrington resigned himself to the fact that Jack Sparrow would never respect the sanctity of the quarterdeck. He stifled a sigh.

"I was just wondering what to do with you," he told Sparrow.

Sparrow tilted his head on one side. "Find me a ship, Captain." He'd stressed that title, Norrington was sure of it. "You find me a ship; I'll go away; and you won't have to do anything with me."

"What have I got to lose?" said Norrington, smiling.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Three: In Which Jack Seeks Solitude

  


* * *

For almost a year he'd craved the sound of voices that weren't his own: real voices, not the nasty hissings of mermaids or the murmurings in an unknown tongue that had drifted to him, from time to time, when the wind blew from the west. Now that the constant comfortable rumble of men's voices, underlying shipboard life like the sound of waves on the hull, was there again, he found he wanted to block his ears against it.

Norrington -- funny to have to think of him as 'Captain', now, rather than 'Commodore' -- had said he'd find a bunk for Jack before first watch: but what Jack wanted right now, now that the island had finally been swallowed up by the horizon, was a door with himself on one side and everyone else on the other.

"Captain," he said, going back over to where Norrington stood, alone, on the quarterdeck, "might I beg the loan of a razor?"

Norrington chuckled. "Vain as ever, Captain Sparrow."

At least he'd remembered the title. Jack set his teeth and forced a smile.

"No one's had to look at me for a while, Captain Norrington. Thought I'd do you all a little favour."

"Come with me," said Norrington abruptly, and he led Jack below.

"I'll have someone bring you some decent clothes," he said, eyeing Jack's rags. "And some hot water."

Jack felt like purring, but the other man's presence made him itch. "Out!" he said, shooing the man from his own cabin: and Norrington left, grinning.

There was a small mirror on the back of the door, and Jack shot a sideways glance at his reflection. He hadn't seen his own face -- or anyone else's -- for a year. Mermaids didn't count, and neither did the vivid conjurations with which he'd entertained himself. Remembering one daydream in particular, Jack eyed the hanging cot speculatively: but he had other business first.

He faced the mirror, and inspected himself.

Only the tapping on the door roused him from half-horrified contemplation. He'd forgotten what to say, so he crossed to the door and opened it. One of the men -- Jack thought he seemed familiar, but perhaps he just had that Navy (ex-Navy) look to him -- brought in a basin of water, and someone's good, newly-sharpened razor, and a pile of folded clothes.

Jack thanked him and shut the door, and leaned on it for a moment, just gathering strength. He looked like a savage. He looked nothing like Captain Jack Sparrow.

He shaved slowly and carefully, not wanting to appear any more outlandish, or bloodstained, than when he'd come aboard. The beard-braids would need refashioning. His skin was pale and raw beneath the fuzzy growth of a year away from mirrors. Teeth still good, and the gold was all still in place: smile, when he essayed one, moderately convincing. He stripped off and washed, methodically, from head to foot: the fresh warm water felt like velvet, even once it was dark with dirt. Civil of Norrington not to mention that he stank.

The clothes weren't Norrington's, but they were still too large for him. They were whole and clean and rough from the loom, without the soft threadbare nap of his … his rags. Jack kicked them into a corner, salvaging only his ghost-of-red bandana, and contorted himself in front of the tiny mirror until he'd arranged it all to his liking.

That was more like it, though something was still missing. Jack blinked and squinted: he was tempted to explore the Captain's desk, but Norrington might come in and find him poking about, and really it'd be ill-mannered. Besides which, there was a perfectly good lamp.

A few messy minutes later -- and his old shirt pressed into service one last time to clear the spillage -- there was lamp-black, bound with oil, to shade his eyes: imperfect, for he'd used a fingertip in the absence of any brush, but it'd pass. _That_ was more like it: more like himself: less like some bedraggled nobody marooned in the middle of nowhere.

"Captain Jack Sparrow," he said to his reflection. "At your … service."

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Four: In Which Norrington Makes Some Observations

  


* * *

"You have to hand it to him, sir," said Bailey. "How many of us could've come through ... through _that_, unscathed?"

His gesture took in the arc of horizon behind them, below which had sunk Sparrow Island: so Sparrow had insisted it be named, and Norrington, smiling, had seen no reason to disagree.

"It remains to be seen," he said to Bailey now, as the two of them stood by the helm, ostensibly conferring about the rig but actually keeping an eye on their flamboyant guest, "whether Mr Sparrow has come through it unscathed, or not."

Bailey frowned. He was a level-headed chap, and as good a shot with a musket as any man Norrington had ever met, but it was plain that Sparrow perplexed him.

"Look at him," he said now. "Parading around the deck as though he owns it, all prettied up like ... well, you know."

Norrington did know. When he'd focussed his glass on Jack Sparrow as the pirate waited on the beach, all weathered and windswept and utterly unkempt, it had been as though he were seeing the man for the first time. Perhaps it was simply that, with two hundred yards of lively waves between them, he'd been out of range of Sparrow's peculiar charm. He'd seen that Jack Sparrow, for all his gilding and blacking and affected ways, was a man his own age or older, whose gaze was fixed on Norrington himself -- though without an eyeglass, he'd little hope of distinguishing more than a silhouette against the sky -- and who held the stump of a knife in a way that spoke of readiness to use it, if need be, against anyone who threatened him. A man who had not survived this long without having, under all the frippery, a heart of courage and strength and determination.

On deck, trimmed and tidied (or carefully _untidied_, thought Norrington with amusement), in clothes that were too big for him -- he'd never been a large man, and his long marooning had refined him to skin and muscle and bone -- and whorishly blackened eyes, he looked younger, at once more innocent and more dangerous. Norrington doubted that Jack Sparrow had _ever_ been truly innocent; for a moment he was tempted to have Bailey shadow the man, and prevent him from corrupting the _Ariel_'s crew with his fables and fantasies.

But watching Jack Sparrow was peculiarly fascinating. Norrington was particularly intrigued by the way that Sparrow hung back from any group of men, though he would greet them readily enough if they spoke first. And when he was drawn into their circle, Norrington saw, he was careful to have the rail at his back, so that no one might come up behind him.

"I'll lay he has some stories to tell!" said Bailey, his admiration plain.

"I'm sure of it," said Norrington dryly, wishing he could make out Sparrow's words. His hands spoke eloquently enough of some tremendous battle, and that was a story Norrington wanted to hear: but he'd rather hear it in private, without an audience to inspire Sparrow to unwarranted inventions. He wanted Sparrow (Norrington suppressed a chuckle at the thought) to be honest with him: he wanted Sparrow to speak to him one to one, captain to captain, man to man.

The _Ariel_ was sailing into a golden sunset. Norrington glanced up at the masthead -- wind in the north-east, and unlikely to change before morning -- and nodded to himself.

"Is your cabin cleared for our guest?" he asked Bailey, and Bailey tore his eyes from the knot of men gathered around Jack Sparrow, nodding.

"We'll have some music, tonight," Norrington announced, smiling. "And an extra half-ration of rum, to welcome Jack Sparrow back to civilisation. Tell the duty officer to make it so."

"Very good, sir," said Bailey, with a salute. Norrington nodded approvingly. He tried not to come all Navy with the men, true enough, but proper respect was another matter.

Left alone once more at the helm, Norrington's gaze turned once more to the former pirate, now quite at ease -- or so it seemed -- amid his eager audience. His words drifted to Norrington amid the creak and rush of the ship's passage: something about mermaids, and scales, and not rubbing them the wrong way.

Norrington grinned. Time enough when the sun was down to see how well Jack Sparrow wore his welcome.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Five: In Which Jack Requires Sanctuary

  


* * *

'Twas all well and good, for Norrington to lay on such a splendid welcome for him -- though in truth the taste of rum, in and of itself, was enough to put a broad, happy smile on Jack's face -- but really, couldn't the fuss be spread over several evenings? Any excuse for a party, and it was clear that the _Ariel_'s crew (good lads one and all, and not so stuck up as Navy gobs, neither) were in the mood to celebrate whatever good luck befell 'em. And Jack was ever so happy not to be stuck on that little island for another minute more, and happy enough to tell 'em all, too, how good it was to be afloat again, with strong drink in his cup and such convivial company.

He didn't mention the scaly thing on the beach, or the eyes in the night, or the bloody mermaids. Not that they'd care that he was gone.

But, Christ, there were a lot of 'em, this little private Navy of Norrington's, and Jack was a little out of practice at keeping quite so many entertained. Out of practice with the rum, too, though _that_ was a skill that he'd enjoy honing afresh. Hate to make Norrington feel his welcome-party wasn't properly appreciated. And it was early yet: the moon was only just above the yard-arm, and it had risen almost as soon as the swift tropical dusk had faded to black.

"How are you enjoying yourself, Mr Sparrow?"

Bloody Norrington. Jack twisted around and scowled up at him from his seat on the top step of the poop-deck stairs. "That's _Captain_ Sparrow," he said darkly, "and we'll deal with the matter of the ship in due course, eh?"

Norrington bowed his head, probably the closest to an apology that Jack'd ever get. "I was rather hoping," he said quietly, "to hear what ... what happened."

Jack closed his eyes and took another restorative draught from the beaker in his hand. He'd known this was coming: and after all, no captain worth his salt would ignore such a hazard, never mind that Jack had a cat in hell's chance of getting Norrington to believe him. And the rum might make it easier, all said and done.

"I've some better stuff in my cabin," said Norrington, as though he'd read Jack's mind. Jack doubted that he had: he'd problems enough himself, sometimes, with that.

"Aye," he said. "'Tis a tale soon told."

But it was not so very easy. Norrington had him trace the _Black Pearl_'s final voyage on an Admiralty chart. "As close as you can," he said, pouring more rum for them both.

"Log book's gone down with the rest," grumbled Jack, blinking back a prickling behind his eyes. Tiredness, no doubt: he'd always turned in soon after dusk, back on the island.

And Norrington, as Jack could've predicted -- well, _had_ predicted -- was dismayingly sceptical about the ... the thing from the deeps.

"Well," snapped Jack eventually, exasperated beyond measure, "if you don't believe a word of it, then how'd I come by _this_ little souvenir, eh?"

The borrowed shirt was covering him decently enough, so there was no reason for the Commo- ... for Captain Norrington to flush, nor to avert his gaze so primly. And there, laid bare as Jack stripped off the breeches, were the round white scars that he'd woken with, all those months ago, beside a fire he hadn't built.

Norrington, after that first flinch, was cool and professional about it. He leaned forward to look at the marks (bringing to mind another little fantasy of Jack's: but now probably wasn't the time to mention _that_) and spread his fingers beside Jack's leg -- Jack's turn to flinch, but in the end Norrington did not touch him -- measuring the breadth of the largest circle.

"I've never seen anything like it," he told Jack, straightening. "Is there any pain?"

Jack shook his head. "Should be an entertaining spectacle, though, next time I've company at bedtime." He cocked an eyebrow at Norrington. "How long 'til we make port, eh?"

"A week, at least," said Norrington coolly. "Put your clothes on, Jack." He had that fastidious expression again, and Jack let his grin broaden. But wait; he'd said 'Jack', and _that_ must be worth something.

Jack pulled his breeches up again (lovely soft cloth, like silk against his sunburnt skin) and settled himself in the chair across from Norrington, leaning forward over the white spaces of the chart to knock his cup against the other's.

"To good company," he said, and waited until Norrington began to echo the toast before he added, "... at bedtime."

"Sparrow! Can you think of nothing else?" Norrington's colour was high: could be just the rum, for sure, but Jack was beginning to have an idea that it -- the flush, and the way he'd said Jack's name, and the way he hadn't looked at Jack as he stripped -- was something else besides. Maybe it was only those dreams and fantasies he'd been enjoying for so long. Maybe: maybe not.

He swayed to his feet (the rum helped with that, at least) and leaned precariously close to Norrington, close enough that he could feel the other man's warm breath on his skin, Jack wanted to close his eyes and enjoy it, but not just yet.

"A year's a long time," he whispered, grinning, "an' a week ain't looking much shorter, either. P'rhaps there's some like-minded gent on this fine boat, eh? Some proper Navy -- beg your pardon, _ex_-Navy -- type who'll take a notorious pirate in hand --"

"Shut _up_, Jack!" And oh, Norrington's hand was hot and strong, and though Jack first thought that he'd be struck, or pushed away, the hand simply came to rest on his shoulder, two splayed fingers touching his bare skin where the wide neck of the shirt fell away from his collarbone.

Jack could not help himself. He pushed into that lovely _other_-touch, just a little: and for a moment the pressure was returned, and Norrington was looking at him without pretence or prejudice. A moment only, and then the touch was gone, and Jack felt cold.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Six: In Which Norrington Rescues Jack

  


* * *

"Who'd've thought it," said Sparrow, with a provocative look. "A year without the touch of another's hand, and then it's you."

"I'll not be mocked, Jack!" Norrington leaned back in his seat, wanting to be out of Jack's reach -- or for Jack to be out of his. But Sparrow didn't rock forward to follow. Instead, he pushed the chair back noisily and was on his feet before Norrington had registered the movement.

"What are you --"

Sparrow might have been pretending, but Norrington thought the frustrated hurt in his eyes was real.

"Wouldn't want to force you to anything you didn't want," he muttered, not meeting Norrington's eyes. "Reckon I should be able to find a friendly hand somewhere below-decks, if I haven't lost my charm."

"Jack!"

Norrington's fingers closed over Jack's as the pirate lifted the latch. For a moment neither of them moved. He could feel Sparrow's breath, quick and uneven, where his shoulder touched Norrington's chest.

"A year," Sparrow said sulkily. "And then you had to play the tease."

"I wasn't teas--"

"You bloody were," said Sparrow, turning so that his back was to the door and scowling at Norrington. "What say you let me go and we'll --"

"Jack!"

Norrington wanted to shake him. Perhaps he just wanted to touch him. He bent forward, propping himself against the door-jamb, and put his mouth next to Sparrow's ear. His heart was so loud it'd give him away to every man on board, if any were listening. He knew exactly what he wanted, now -- was distantly surprised at it, and amused that it'd taken him so long to come to something so _obvious_ \-- but he had no idea of how to go about it.

"Jack," he murmured softly, and felt the pirate shiver. "I'm not teasing. I just don't ... I can't ... " Can't even _speak_ of it, he thought mockingly to himself. But Jack Sparrow was close enough that he could feel the heat of the other man, at throat and gut and groin, and the way the pirate was looking at him made him wonder if Jack had understood.

Norrington reached around Jack and turned the key in the lock. "There," he said.

"You're locking me in?" said Sparrow, with a feral grin.

"I'm locking everyone else _out_," Norrington corrected. He took half a step back. "Do you want me to touch you?" he said, frowning.

"Back there," said Sparrow, swivelling one hand bonelessly off to the right, "'twas just me, mate. Me and my good right hand."

"I didn't --" said Norrington stiffly.

"And I dreamt of you there, James," said Sparrow softly.

There was so much to answer, there -- not least that the pirate had called him by his first name -- but all Norrington could say, supremely irrelevant, was, "M-more than once?"

"More than once," said Jack, and he licked his lips.

Norrington still had no idea what to do, but he thought that if he didn't kiss Jack Sparrow immediately, he might break. Jack must've seen it coming, or perhaps he was just too slow, because for a little while it was unclear who was kissing whom. The heat and hardness of Jack's body under his right hand -- the left still occupied in holding him up, off the door -- felt at once like, and nothing like, Anamaria or Elizabeth or that girl at the Ship. He'd never kissed a man before, but that wasn't important: what mattered was that it was _Jack_ he was kissing.

Some time later they were on the narrow bunk, lying entangled with Jack's erection pushing against James' hip and Jack sprawled half over him, moaning into another kiss as he tried to get James' breeches unbuttoned. Norrington felt hot and slightly sick, and almost claustrophobic. He wanted to feel cold air (and hot flesh) on his skin. He wanted to touch Jack: he wanted, in fact, to have Jack responding to his hands the way he was responding to Jack's: but his hands wouldn't move, and Jack was writhing on top of him.

Eventually he got one hand free, and used it to pull Jack closer as he pushed up against him. Jack groaned as though he was in real pain, but Norrington took no notice. He rolled them both until Jack was on the cot and Norrington was pinning him down; then propped himself on one elbow, and slid his free hand down between their bodies, past Jack's busily-working hand at the open front of his own breeches, until he could curve his palm against the hot, hard bulge of Jack's erection. Jack began to babble, and Norrington kissed him again to keep him quiet, while his hand began a series of strokes designed to have quite the opposite effect. He was furiously excited. Jack's hand on him, Jack's tongue exploring his mouth, the noises, the heat, the way that every move he made had its reaction: he already knew that once would not be enough. His own climax took him almost by surprise: he was making loud, baying noises into the secrecy of Jack's mouth even while his own hand worked over the sweat-dampened front of Jack's breeches, rewarding every push with a stroke, losing his rhythm and finding it again just as Jack froze and shuddered and pulled hard on Norrington's hair.

Norrington tucked his face against the wet skin of Sparrow's neck and licked. Jack tasted of salt and dirt.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Seven: In Which Jack is Liberated

  


* * *

Jack was seldom prey to sentiment, and he was tempted to chalk up his current emotional state to a surfeit of rum and the unexpected release of a deluge of carnal humours: but he didn't care to mislead himself, either, and so he lay there in Norrington's bunk, feigning sleep and thinking furiously, until Norrington's breath slowed and steadied against his neck.

No denying it'd been good, and more than good: just what he'd wanted, though more than he'd ever honestly expected to get. Who'd've thought that James Norrington would fall so easily? Jack made it a habit to flirt with everyone, no matter if they showed any sign of interest: all the more fun, really, when they didn't. Until tonight, he'd've sworn that Norrington would rather chop off his own hand than lay it on Jack Sparrow's bare flesh.

Jack, in the darkness, allowed himself a slow smile of reminiscence. Such fervour! Norrington had to've been thinking about that. Thinking about Jack, maybe. That hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment thing.

Maybe it wasn't a unique one, either. Maybe it was going to happen again.

The shiver that ran through Jack alarmed him. He eased himself out from under the other man's arm. The lantern was still burning; there was a vague sussurus of merriment from the deck, aft. Norrington slept on, and Jack hardly dared look at him for fear of being overbalanced by the surge of attraction that he felt.

They were both still half-dressed, and Jack need do no more than pull up his breeches and set his shirt to rights. Perfectly respectable, he told himself, and tried not to think on whether the crew had heard anything ... untoward.

He didn't want to go back out and talk and laugh and drink: but he couldn't stay here, though that narrow space next to Norrington tempted him so. But it was Norrington, Jack's old foe -- though Jack had to concede that he'd always played fair, after that first time on the dock -- and Jack hadn't exactly planned to renounce a year's celibacy in such ... august company. He needed to think about the implications: he _wanted_ to think about the future.

He let himself out (not forgetting to take the rest of the rum, as Norrington would surely have bidden him) as quietly as he could; very quietly indeed, since he'd already discarded the stiff leather shoes that they'd provided for him. Half the men, at least, were still gathered at the waist, cheering and singing and, some of 'em, dancing a jig. It made Jack's head ache to look at them. He hauled himself up onto the roof of the for'ard cabins -- not a yard above Norrington's bunk, give or take a few feet left or right -- and rolled onto his back, gazing up at the stars.

There were so many scraps of information whirling in Jack's brain that it made him dizzy. This war, and England gone: not that he'd any special love for the place, but still, _gone_. That meant ... meant all the English ports and settlements were Spanish now, or French. What about Scotland? Always pally with France, so they'd likely ended up with half the North Country. What about old Swann, and his lovely daughter, and her lovely blacksmith? He'd ask --

Jack chuckled aloud at his own evasions. "Norrington," he whispered to the night.

Norrington wasn't the man -- the _Commodore_ \-- Jack'd known before. Never mind the obvious stuff (he'd have to ask him, some time, about that leg; about the _Ariel_; about, -- yes, yes -- the Turners), he'd been as cast away, as lost and alone, as Jack himself. Everything he cared for gone: the man himself toughened and refined by the sheer act of survival. And, from Jack's admittedly partisan point of view, improved: less of that (Jack grinned) ramrod-stiff Naval rectitude, less of Duty and Law and Service. Now Norrington was his own man, in his own war, and Jack had plenty of experience of _that_.

And he'd a fine ship -- Jack glanced up at the rigging, and waggled his fingers in a little wave (returned at once; good show) to the chap on watch in the maintop -- with which to wage his war. A fine ship and a happy one, even without a Navy to keep 'em in line. It was just like Jack'd always said, a good captain didn't need Articles or punishments if he had respect.

Jack was willing to respect Norrington. He was willing, in fact, to do quite a few things with, to, for James Norrington: always assuming (his smile faded) that Norrington did not, on waking, immediately order Jack hanged from the yard-arm, or tipped overboard like shark-bait, or left to rot back on his own (or any other) little island.

_That_ thought sent a cold shiver down Jack's spine, all the colder for having been preceded so recently by the warm and ardent glow of what he'd _like_ to happen.

And after all, he was Jack Sparrow. Captain Jack Sparrow. A pretty mess it'd be, if he couldn't talk his way round Norrington's doubts and regrets. Always assuming --

"Jack," said someone from behind him.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Eight: In Which Norrington's Vision Clears

  


* * *

He'd known, even half-asleep, when Jack eased himself out of the bunk, and crept out of the cabin. Norrington had wanted to hold onto him: wanted (to his faint surprise) to carry on from the point at which they'd left off. Perhaps it was the rum, but he had an inkling that the whole thing -- the whole unexpected, obvious thing -- been in his thoughts, or his dreams, for a while now. He was surprised not to feel more surprised: which thought, articulated, came to him in Jack Sparrow's voice, and made him laugh.

No point now in pretending to be asleep. Sparrow, no doubt, had gone off somewhere to brood, or plot, or simply to hide: _he_ hadn't seemed all that surprised, either. (Norrington recalled Jack's remark about his ... his _fantasies_, and blushed.) Nor had he seemed unwilling: quite the opposite. And Norrington was willing to bet that Jack Sparrow knew much, much more of the ways of men with men than did Norrington himself: an intriguing thought. Equally possible, of course, that Norrington had been just what Jack said: the first person to touch him, the first friendly hand.

Norrington thought it had been more than that, though. He lay for a moment, listening to the sounds from outside. Had he and Jack been loud enough to be heard? No use worrying about it now: and this wasn't the Navy, where a man could be hanged for such things.

He wanted ... He wanted Jack back in his cabin, at once: not (well, not only) to touch and look at and laugh with, but to talk to, to talk this out, to find out what had happened, and if it might happen again.

And he knew where Jack was: could hear him. He stood up carefully, stooping a little to avoid the low ceiling: tidied himself, wincing a little at the sticky mess and grinning as he recalled that climacteric moment: then, opening the cabin door stealthily, he stepped out in his bare feet, straightening to his full height.

There, as he'd known.

"Jack," he said softly: then fought back a laugh at the pirate's startlement.

"James," said Sparrow, exasperated. He had kept hold of the rum bottle, and now Norrington nodded at it.

"Come in for a minute," he said. "And bring the rum back, eh?"

"An' why should --"

"Jack," said Norrington warningly: just that, but it was enough. Sparrow slithered down from the cabin roof -- somehow managing not to spill a drop of drink -- and, after one impenetrable look at Norrington, went into the cabin ahead of him.

Norrington closed the door.

"Jack, I --"

"There's only one question worth asking yourself, mate, and that's whether you've any regrets," said Jack, settling himself comfortably in the chair again and pouring himself another cup of rum, just as though the last hour had been a dream.

Norrington tilted his head and regarded Sparrow, but he could not find a trace of consternation. Sparrow stared back at him, a faint smile on his face; utterly unreadable.

Norrington wanted to laugh. Instead, he held his tongue until Sparrow opened his mouth to speak; then said, calmly, "I don't regret anything. Do _you_?"

There was Sparrow's most aggravating smile again, broad and sharp and glittery. For some reason it made Norrington think of the way Jack'd looked as he spent, and his own smile widened.

"Nothing at all, mate: James, if I may ...? Thank you kindly. I don't regret a moment of it, James, an' I never thought ..."

"I can well believe you never thought, Jack," said Norrington, the corner of his mouth twitching.

"Never thought, _James_, that my fond fancies would come out so nicely," said Sparrow, with a smirk.

"What next, Jack?" said Norrington.

"We could do it again?"

Norrington closed his eyes briefly, fighting back the urge to accept that invitation. "I meant, what will you do? A ship can't have two captains, and I'm not --"

"I want my own ship," said Sparrow, leaning forward, and his eyes were blacker and more intent than Norrington had ever seen them. "My own command."

"And ... this?" said Norrington, wondering why 'this' should suddenly matter so much, when at sunset he'd never suspected it at all.

"Well, James," said Sparrow, beaming at him, so earnest that Norrington longed to believe him, "we'll be equals, eh? You and me."

"I don't --" began Norrington, and then stopped, for Sparrow was right.

"It's not so bad," Sparrow said; and when Norrington raised his head, he winked. "No reason that we shouldn't meet up, from time to time: swap news, share any prizes -- don't deny it, mate, you're privateering with the best of 'em, never mind that you ain't got that letter -- have a brief respite from the war."

"It's not your war," said Norrington bitterly, wanting to spark a response from the pirate: but Sparrow only shrugged.

Norrington stared down at his hands, at the blank spaces on the chart that was still spread over the table -- should put that away -- at Sparrow's scarred fingers, a hand's-breadth from his own. The fingers retreated, and returned wrapped around a full cup of rum, which Norrington took and drained.

Oddly peaceful, to sit here with Jack Sparrow, head hazy with rum and satisfaction and desire, not speaking, not even _looking_: comfortable. And Sparrow was mercifully (if uncharacteristically) silent, as though he too were enjoying this respite.

The lantern guttered at last, and Norrington, half-dozing, raised his head.

"D'you want me to go? ... Norrington?"

Norrington blinked, and looked Jack Sparrow in the eye, and shook his head.

"Don't go," he said, essaying a smile. "That is --"

"I'll stay," said Sparrow, and his smile gleamed brighter, closer than before.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Twenty-Nine: In Which Jack Sets a Challenge

  


* * *

Jack Sparrow felt off-balance, and it wasn't a sensation that he cared for at all. Oh, all very well to lounge here in the sun, not lifting a finger; for after all, this was another man's command, and he was a _passenger_. and quite delightful, truth be told, to stretch out and feel, all over his body, sweetly sore mementos -- what was that Frog word? ah yes, _souvenirs_ \-- of the night just passed.

Bloody Norrington (and Jack could not stop himself smiling at the thought) looked intolerably fresh, as though he'd enjoyed a blameless night's sleep, which Jack knew very well had not been the case. Disgusting, that's what it was. (But oh, the look on James' face when Jack'd kissed him just _so_, in the soft crease below his hip-bone.)

This time yesterday he'd been frolicking in the rain. Now he was basking on the roof of the captain's cabin, on board the _Ariel_ \-- a privateer if e'er he'd seen one, never mind James Norrington's high-toned ideals -- sailing north-west over a calm friendly ocean towards Jamaica, where Jack would find himself a ship to call his own. And then ... then ...

"Tired, Sparrow?"

"Go 'way," murmured Jack without opening his eyes, smiling. "Asleep."

"Thought you'd have more stamina," said Norrington cheerfully.

"Not as young as I was, mate," Jack pointed out. "And it's been a busy day all told. Being rescued takes it out of a man."

"I noticed," murmured Norrington. Jack risked a look through slitted eyes. Norrington stood at ease -- distinctly so, any man could see he'd been Navy -- on the deck between the cabin and the rail, one hand on the cabin roof just by Jack's hip, gazing out at the cloudless sky, and flicking glance after glance at Jack.

Oh, those hands.

It had been so different to anything Jack'd dreamt, waking or sleeping, back on Sparrow Island. He'd never imagined being Norrington's first, or thought of how good it might feel simply to be _touched_, not demandingly or roughly or punishingly but wonderingly. Which wasn't to say that Norrington was entirely meek or gentle: oh Christ, when he'd --

He was saying something.

"Eh?" said Jack, intelligently.

"You never asked about them," said Norrington. He was speaking normally now, so that any passing sailor might overhear.

Asked about who? thought Jack. "I make it my business," he said, "never to ask a straight question if I reckon the answer won't be to my taste."

"They're alive and well," said Norrington: then, frowning a little, "the Turners, Jack: Will and Elizabeth. Her father got them out in time. They're living in Copenhagen."

"Copenhagen!" exclaimed Jack, sitting up and shaking his head to clear the dizziness. "I was there once: lovely place. Rains a lot," he added.

"I thought you'd want to know," said Norrington, smiling. "Now, Captain Sparrow." Abruptly, he was all business. Jack cast an eye about for any eavesdropper who might've inspired the change in tack.

"Aye?"

"You were talking of finding a vessel of your own," said Norrington.

"So keen to be rid of me, mate?" Jack tried to sound insouciant.

Norrington looked at him unblinkingly. "A ship can't have two captains, Jack," he said: then, without even a glance to see who was in earshot, "though I'm more than happy to entertain you as my ... guest."

Jack leered at him. "Oh, _good_."

"Well," responded Norrington, and cleared his throat.

Jack smiled more. "About this ship," he encouraged. "Unless you'd rather discuss it in private, eh?"

The look Norrington gave him warmed him from head to foot. Funny, he'd been tired not half a glass ago.

"The dockyards," Norrington explained. "Slack as anything, I hear tell."

"Worse than the Navy's, eh?"

"_Much_ worse, Jack: they're French."

"Oh," said Jack. "Silly me. Do go on."

"I know there's a couple of fine ships in for repairs at Port Louis," said Norrington.

"Port Louis?"

"It was Port Royal, before," said Norrington grimly. "I saw one of them crippled, though I was only a passenger ..." His voice trailed off, and oooh, was that a flush?

"Out with it, James," ordered Jack. "Passenger? And you with the lovely _Ariel_ all to yourself?"

"I sailed with a captain you know," confessed Norrington: distinctly a confession, as his stance, his tone, his expression attested. "A woman. A pi--"

"Anamaria!" exclaimed Jack, practically levitating. His grin felt fit to split his face open. "She's alive!"

Norrington was definitely blushing. Oh, that fair skin: Jack lost himself briefly in reminiscence. "Very much so," said Norrington.

"Aha," crowed Jack, "it's like that, eh? And you didn't recruit her for your little war? Remiss --"

"Don't mock me, Jack!" Norrington sighed, and looked away. "Anyway, Anamaria's already at war."

Jack recalled the tale she'd told him, one night off Trinidad, and winced. "Aye," he allowed. "True enough. But she's well?"

Norrington chuckled, though it sounded a little strangled. "It was Anamaria who told me about the _Black Pearl_," he explained. "If it hadn't been for her, I'd never have come looking for you."

"So you might say I owe her my life," Jack mused, with a grimace. "I'll never hear the end of it."

"You don't ... mind? About ..." Norrington gestured.

"Mind, mate? Why should I mind?" The thought of it was thoroughly ... interesting. "Just wish I'd been --"

"Jack!" protested Norrington, grinning. "Perhaps we'd better continue this conversation in private, after all."

Jack raised his eyebrows, and tried to look appalled; but he could not stop himself smiling back at Norrington. And anyway, he'd dreamed of this. More than once.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Thirty: In Which Norrington Countenances Piracy

  


* * *

It was easy to see, from the quayside, where the Navy refitted their ships: a steady stream of rope-coils, timbers, rolled sailcloth and wooden crates poured in through the gates at the eastern end of the quay, and out came an equal flow of unburdened workmen, half-naked in the heat, busily trotting off to bring more supplies.

Norrington thought of Jack stripped to the waist, hauling cordage, and chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"The way you've infected my thoughts."

"Pirate," said Sparrow, raising his cup in a toast. "D'you see her?"

"Yes," said Norrington. "She's the one with the raked masts, at the end of the breakwater."

He raised a hand to point and Jack slapped it down. "We're not interested in any of that, remember?"

"I remember," said Norrington. "A fishing boat, if anyone asks."

He drank more ale, and watched as the daily business of the port ticked along, like the workings of some intricate device. Someone was yelling in Spanish at a foreman who'd sent away his team: someone else was arguing with a Frenchman who was pretending to speak no English.

"It doesn't make any difference to them, does it?" said Norrington, feeling a surge of bitterness that had nothing to do with the taste of the beer. "It doesn't matter whose flag's flying over the fort."

"Not in the slightest, Captain," said Sparrow, tipping out the thick dregs at the bottom of his cup. He examined the way they fell onto the cobbles, and grinned suddenly like a man who's seen good fortune. "Ready, then?" "As ready as I'll ever be," said Norrington. "Are you sure --"

"Have you forgotten who I am, Captain?" demanded Sparrow, with a provocative leer.

"How could I forget?" said Norrington. "I simply find it difficult to believe that I've allowed myself to become a part of any plan devised by you."

That earned him a gilt-edged smile, all sincerity and wounded good nature. "It worked last time!"

"I remember it well," muttered Norrington.

They had been sauntering along the quay, towards those huge gates: well-guarded gates, as it turned out. Norrington suffered a brief moment of uncertainty as he drew close enough to see the foreign cut and colour of the guards' uniform jackets, and the ubiquitously deadly gleam of well-tended weaponry. But when he glanced at Jack, wanting reassurance, Jack wasn't even looking at him. He was gawping, from under his hat, like any landlubber exposed to the reek and noise of a working dockyard. He trusts me to do my part, thought Norrington. Perhaps this is normal: perhaps it's how actors feel, before they go on stage.

The guard waved them through so quickly -- not a quarter of the way into Norrington's well-rehearsed speech, in halting German, about an appointment with a shipwright: Keppel, wasn't it? -- that Norrington had to quell the urge to take the man's name and report him for slackness. Under the circumstances it would hardly have been wise. For here they were, inside a French Naval dockyard, with a plan that seemed likely to come off very well. Norrington revised his estimation of the French Navy downwards, by several notches.

It was possible that he'd simply been infected with Jack's ridiculous self-confidence.

Close to, he could see where fresh paint covered the scars of the _Sorciére'_s encounter with Anamaria and her crew. There was a group of men watching as the last of the _Sorciére'_s supplies were carried aboard. The brig's mainsail -- new canvas, Norrington could see -- had been reefed, and the crew were busying themselves with halyards and shrouds. He recognised one or two of the men.

Next to the _Sorciére_ was the _El Gammo_, which Norrington thought might have been a frigate before the French had got at her masts and rigging. Now she resembled the bastard offspring of a xebec and a brigantine. There were a few sailors milling about on deck, not -- he could see -- doing very much, but looking busy enough to be safe from further orders.

"That one?" he muttered to Sparrow, not looking at his companion.

"That one," confirmed Sparrow. "After you, Captain."

In the end it was just as easy as Sparrow had made it look before. The idlers on board _El Gammo_ were only too happy to abandon ship: some of them went over the bow rather than venture near the notorious Jack Sparrow, returned from the dead, and his villainous, pistol-wielding companion. Norrington found that he was enjoying himself: it was a different sort of battle, to be sure, but somehow a cleaner one. Between them, they made short work of the mooring-lines, and managed to haul the forecourse aloft before there was any fuss from the quay.

"They're coming," Norrington said urgently to Sparrow, who held a pistol in each hand.

Sparrow grinned, and in that moment he looked more dangerous than Norrington had ever seen him before. "Let them come," he said.

_El Gammo_ was drifting away from the breakwater, just enough of a breeze to give her some forward motion. Some bright spark had thought of grapnels: one thudded to the deck behind them, and there was the whistle of shot.

Sparrow licked a finger and held it up, unnecessarily testing the wind. "Shall we go, Captain Norrington?"

This was the difficult part, and Norrington was sure that his weak leg would betray him at the critical moment. Sparrow heaved a grapnel of his own into the shrouds of the _Sorciére_ \-- no great achievement, they'd passed close enough that Norrington could've reached out and scratched the fresh paint if he'd had a boathook to hand -- and within a minute the two of them were on the deck of the _Sorciére_.

"Good day to you, sir," said one of the sailors: Woodhouse, who'd been with the _Ariel_ since the battle off Port Royal. "Welcome aboard!"

"No trouble finding work, then?" said Sparrow, coming up beside them and leaning in so close that Norrington had to clench his fists against the urge to haul Jack up against himself.

"None at all, Captain Sparrow," said Woodhouse. "Told the Frogs we was deserters. Welcomed us with open arms, they did."

"Excellent!" said Sparrow. "Well, what are you all waiting for? Let's be on our way!"

Woodhouse was not the only man to turn to Norrington. _Pirate_, their horrified silence said.

"This ship is now under Captain Sparrow's command," said Norrington mildly, one eye on _El Gammo_ as the frigate drifted sideways towards the beacon at the end of the breakwater. "Captain, if you'd be so good as to drop me at my ship?"

There was a beat of silence, amid the noise of reefing and hauling all around them, as Sparrow, unsmiling, looked straight at Norrington. Then the moment passed, and Sparrow nodded and turned to snap out pithy, precise orders to the men who'd stayed on board.

* * *

  


###  Chapter Thirty-One: In Which Jack Sets a Course

  


* * *

The _Sorciére_ was a light wench, and she wasn't happy at being stolen. Commandeered. She pitched and yawed as though she were storm-tossed, though the afternoon was mild and there was only a gentle swell out of the south-west to rock her. Jack Sparrow called out more remarks on the trim of the sails: his new crew, no more'n a dozen of 'em and all good lads, looked at him as if he was mad, but did as he told them anyway.

Jack was deliriously happy. He was out on the water once more, his own man and master, flying for his life before the sluggish (and, frankly, far from well-captained) French warships that'd been despatched to face this latest foe. The wind on his face, the blue horizon rushing towards him: white canvas (but black was only ever for his beloved) booming and sighing above him, solid oak bucking beneath him. And, ahead in the east, hull down, the _Ariel_.

Ah yes, the _Ariel_. "We'll meet up in Tortuga," Norrington had said. No: "I'll see you in Tortuga."

Jack grinned. Easy enough to give him the slip, and sail instead for Nassau or Trinidad or, oooh, Batavia. Hanoi. Copenhagen. He was a free man, and he had a ship once more -- never mind that she was a feisty tub -- and all the world was his.

Every glance at the compass reminded him of that old fever-dream: North, Norrington. The Commodore (ah, but he wasn't that any more) coming to claim Jack, all certain and sure and direct, hands on the humming latitude-lines to feel his way to where Jack lay. Coming, anyway, to his rescue, and in more ways than one.

The memory of that delirious night back on the island -- and of the various rescues he and Norrington had performed, one on the other, since he'd left the place behind -- made Jack smirk. That crosshatch of lines that covered all the charts wasn't a net or a trap, he saw now. Oh no! It was a gaming-board, laid out for their little game: for several games, in fact.

There was the game that Norrington was playing, no longer so desperately alone, with the French and all their allies. (The _Sorciére_ pitched sharply, and Jack slapped the helm and pulled her back to her true course, murmuring nonsense to her.) A risky game, yet vastly more enjoyable when every prize won him not only wealth and gain -- or, as it might be, more sugar, cloth, soap than he'd ever wanted -- but Norrington's ... approval? Friendship? Jack notched his forefinger at the corner of his mouth, thinking. Neither of those was quite right. It was not about approval (Jack was determined to find out Norrington's limits) nor friendship, though friendship was part of it. It was more than that, and Jack didn't have a label for it, not just yet.

So: that game, against the French and what remained of the Spanish. And there was the other game, 'twixt Norrington and himself: a friendly game but a fierce one, played out between allies. Equals. Speaking of which ...

Jack raised his glass to his eye, and swore. The ocean before them was empty, though a quick sweep to the west showed that he would have company, of the foreign sort, before much longer. Company, and the _Ariel_ fled: for Norrington knew his ship, and knew how to make her fly.

"Come _on_, you simpering witch!" cried Jack to his ship. "Going to let a Navy man outsail you, eh?"

"Sir, I --" began Woodhouse, bravely.

"Raise the topgallants!" Jack ordered. "If we don't catch the breeze, it's a French jail for us all, gentlemen: and I don't need to tell you the state of their jails. And anyway," he added, sure of their attention, "the French won't _dare_ come into Tortuga."

By Tortuga, the _Sorciére_ would be his in truth. In Tortuga, he'd send the men out into every tavern and brothel where sailors might gather, bidding them let slip the name of their captain: then the _Sorciére_ would have her complement. In Tortuga, he'd seek out Norrington and persuade him to share his plans: and then, maybe, Jack Sparrow would surprise him with a plan or two of his own.

Beneath his feet, the _Sorciére_ gave one wicked, sudden lurch: and then, set free, began to race east over the dark, concealing sea.

-end-


End file.
